It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
> With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress.
But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.