Posted by totalperspectiv 20 hours ago
This is, unfortunately, contrary to previous advice of specializing.
It’s a great time to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
I always felt repulsed by specialization due to diminishing returns and the fact im curious about everything. But I though about it and picking up various experiences to avoid a specialization is, in a sense, itself a specialization: it's unlikely there's another person with a similar set of experiences!
Reminds me of how Python is termed "2nd best pick for every task". It's rarely the best but it covers a lot of ground, so by starting with it, you can uncover what would be a better language. So a generalist can also be a first pick for something, at least until it's more clear about what's a better pick.
Anyways sorry for rambling, I agree with you. If a young person is reading this, the worst thing you can do is specialize too early (read the book I mentioned!); go explore the world first before settling and picking a direction
I see generalists plateauing while I'm not able to go technical enough due to token counts not allowing for it.
I can understand every problem, ask and explanation for every paragraph evenreorganizae a clearly suboptimal PDF notes from my teacher's class or Latex.
It is an aceleretor of my education.
:)
(At least it tells us that it wasn’t written by Claude. Maybe you did it on purpose.)
I had to learn coding when a reference book was all I had to help when I got stuck. Then the Google and StackOverflow came and people complained about no-knowledge coders copy-pasting their way through tasks. AI is just an extension of that.
Yes, you can push out 5,000 line PRs blindly, but you can also use AI to help you speed past blockers, to investigate why things are structured in a certain way, explain what a block of code is doing, propose 3 alternative approaches and explain each, etc.
We say "coding is only part of what a SWE does" but you can't do the rest without understanding what the code is doing and meant to do, and why.
With LLMs turning everything I valued to shit, I have turned my attention to nature, ary, feelings, relationships, and the other things that it cannot reach. These things are also worth being curious about.
Spell checking via AI seems... pointless? Unless this is a means of stating "AI did a once-over of this before I hit submit" in which case this is somewhat disingenuous.