AI is a tool and using it well takes skill

ChrisArchitect

Related: 'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269

yipinwong

This is an argument about a framing issue. Markets try to put things in perspective to sell more. Remember razors used to be for men only? But hte brilliant marketer (forgot the name) made it so that trimming makes women more feminine? Now razor sales doubled? Anyways, same thing here. Those who want to sell AIs want to make it as non-tool but know-it-all do-it-all for you. Those who wants to use it view it as a tool. Just frame it the way you like to see how you should use/view AIs.

shoebilyas_hanz

Agreed, in my experience as an engineer if you want to build a personal project on a weekend yes AI is good for that but the moment you start scaling your application, that's where real engineers who understand the engineering well are needed. The skill and expertise of a true engineer coupled with the speed of AI is my sweet spot

Fordec

If automation can't be a skill, Factorio isn't a game about how well you can automate.

extr

I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days. The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks. The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.

smy20011

AI is incredible tool when you want to use it to enhance your skill (learn complex codebase, experiment different solution and understand the limit of complex system). However, most of people use it as a wishing machine and outsource their thinking.

troupo

> AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill. And that skill is? Any concrete verifiable examples? That can be replicated, repeated by others or adopted by others? > A compiler performs substantial work without the programmer continuously directing each operation. Yes, and the compiler produces the same output for the same input all the time. And when it doesn't, it's a bug or a specified behaviour [1] > Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut. Holding a chisel does not make you a sculptor. Yes, but you can learn the actual techniques that let you make a straight cut 100% of the time. And make you a sculptor. --- The rest of the small article doesn't even begin to approach the premise of the title. [1] Yes, I know it's not strictly true. But compilers are 100% predictable compared to LLMs.

tehnoslow

I am inclined to agree with the view that AI is merely a tool. And, incidentally, using it rationally isn't always easy.

jwpapi

I‘ve been on both camps and been critized for it (see my comments), and now I think these are some of the most useless disussions on HN, as they are heavily skewed by all of our life situations.

g-b-r

just for a bit of context, “Huahai is an entrepreneur. He co-founded Juji, a company building an AI agent platform”

varispeed

> code me an app, AI. ...AI codes an app... > I don't like it. Make it like this. ...AI codes an app... > I don't like it. See this app? Make it like it. ...AI codes an app... > I don't like it. Hmm. Draw me an elephant. ...AI draws an elephant... > I don't like it. This AI is stupid.

ChicagoDave

Software engineering experience might be visualized as a panel with a few dozen buttons and levers. The engineers that are most successful with LLMs are the ones that understand more of that panel.

sdevonoes

It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now) I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)

jgord

Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time. The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability. If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education. There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think. I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]

alecst

I don't understand the point of this debate. Rich's point is good. Having a mini-army of highly intelligent beings at your fingertips is not an ordinary "tool." And it minimizes the fact that these things are only getting smarter. Having an entity much smarter than you--could that entity seriously be considered your "tool"? Just your tool? Or are the people on the "just a tool" side of this debate not taking that possibility seriously?

schleck8

The amount of skill it requires is decreasing every month. I would have agreed with GPT 5.3 Codex but Opus 5.5 is more or less foolproof

OptionOfT

As someone laid off just now, I wish companies saw this. I genuinely don't know where to go with my 'skills' as a software engineer, both pre and post AI. The market is shrinking, the pressure to review code is so high, I'm kinda relieved to not be at the $last_place anymore, but looking on LinkedIn or calling around my network... there isn't a lot out there.

sriram_malhar

No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully. The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals. When you say AI, learn to say "AI companies".

sillywabbit

Googling is a skill. AI is a slot machine.

mosesman

As Nader has said: Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is literally saying professional photography is dead because everyone has a camera in their pocket. Professional photographers are different to everyday phone-photo takers because they have the experience built up over so many years in that sector, same as AI SWE, where the humans in the loop need experience to master AI SWE.