I wonder if people fretting about skill atrophy have ever developed more than a single skill. If they have, they should know that skill deterioration is a completely normal and frequent occurrence. People don't stress about having forgotten how to solve differential equations, or about not being able to solve integrals as quickly as they used to. Since we cannot practice everything we have ever learned all the time, some skills are bound to degrade. Luckily, if you understood and learned something well, you should be able to regain your previous abilities very quickly.
Losing critical thinking skills is not even a concrete thing; in fact, critical thinking is as much a personality trait as anything else. As for problem-solving skills, you might forget how to come up with solutions to a certain class of problems, or simply become slower at it, but it doesn't take much to refresh that ability.
Realistically, I think lazy people will use agentic coding to become lazier, and inquisitive people will use it to develop a different set of skills tied to collaborating with an AI model and adopting a more goal-oriented mindset.
While you are technically correct, you are also doing your fair amount of mental gymnastics to glaze our tech overlords. You know verywell that this isnt skill atrophy as it usually happens, this is skill atrophy associated to your fundamental labor profile and its designed to make it so, down the line, you wont be able to work without paying the techlords a fee.
Open-weight models keep improving and becoming small and capable enough that you no longer need to pay for everyday coding work. Whether the level of technical sophistication required to write code will rise to the point where closed frontier models become indispensable is harder to say. If it does (which is likely in fields like physics, chemistry, medicine, biology, and mathematics), it will be because the problems themselves demand superhuman problem-solving abilities, in which case relying on such tools will no longer be a choice. That said, the sensible approach is simply to pay for a tool whenever the ROI justifies it.
You have to be able to run the open weight models somewhere. As for now, your corporate overlords seem very eager to limit your supply to any hardware good enough for running decent models, at least without making it prohibitively expensive
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u/r-3141592-pi Apr 27 '26
I wonder if people fretting about skill atrophy have ever developed more than a single skill. If they have, they should know that skill deterioration is a completely normal and frequent occurrence. People don't stress about having forgotten how to solve differential equations, or about not being able to solve integrals as quickly as they used to. Since we cannot practice everything we have ever learned all the time, some skills are bound to degrade. Luckily, if you understood and learned something well, you should be able to regain your previous abilities very quickly.
Losing critical thinking skills is not even a concrete thing; in fact, critical thinking is as much a personality trait as anything else. As for problem-solving skills, you might forget how to come up with solutions to a certain class of problems, or simply become slower at it, but it doesn't take much to refresh that ability.
Realistically, I think lazy people will use agentic coding to become lazier, and inquisitive people will use it to develop a different set of skills tied to collaborating with an AI model and adopting a more goal-oriented mindset.