How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era?

What skills are atrophying that would be useful in the future?

If you're letting LLMs do more than assisting, don't. That's my advice. But if like you're title they're just assisting you, then what skills are atrophying? You still review the code and understand it right? You still second guess the LLMs proposed solutions and look for better approaches right?

Articulating how LLM assistance is different than junior programmers writing code and assisting would be useful, everyone has different setups and workflows, so it's hard to say in my opinion.

The skills that atrophy are the ones you weren't using anyway. If you let the LLM do the interesting/engaging parts, that's on you, not the tool

Have a personal site and passion (read: not side gig) projects you work on outside of work. Hand code, get frustrated, be ambitious, don’t open Claude every time you forget a tailwind class

If you don’t have ideas, spent more time away from the screen, they will come.

Ask HN 1800: How to avoid losing spinning wheel skills in new spinning jenny era?

Ask HN 1920: How to avoid losing farrier skills in new automobile era?

Ask HN 1980: How to avoid losing typewriting and shorthand skills in new microcomputer era?

Ask HN 1990: How to avoid losing assembly language skills in new C++ era?

Ask HN 1995: How to avoid losing DOS TUI app dev skills in new Windows era?

Ask HN 2000: How to avoid losing Visual Basic skills in new web application era?

(The answer, btw, is if you are still interested in such niche skills, then you just have to practice on your own, or find a niche product or marketplace).

One way is to not give in to LLM hype and ignore LLM grifters.

Your technical skills are shaped by market demand, and they always have been.

How to avoid skill atrophy? Easy. Limit your use of LLMs. Intentionally practice. It's what I do.

You're losing if you're handing your brain over to LLMs right now, because companies would prefer to hire someone with more up-to-date coding skills, even if they then force them to use LLMs. So the winning move is to resist using LLMs for as long as possible.

Stop fanboying the industry's attempted commodification of your work, and get back to the basics.

Simply don’t use an llm to assist you? You don’t have to, I don’t. I don’t even use an lsp.

IMO the code itself has become much less valuable. Most people in this thread are telling you to stay in the code but I would argue you need to stay current on how to architect a good project. What supporting infra do you need? Did you pick the right language? Did you break the project up into appropriate tasks? You need to become a really great PM.

Learn to wrangle your agent better than everyone else. Don't rely on the chat too much, break up your project into tasks, learn to use sub-agents.

Learn to use the new tools well.

This tool seems obvious but its message is really that what you prompt is profoundly important.

https://developers.googleblog.com/conductor-introducing-cont...

I honestly think a better title would be "how to stay relevant in LLM era"