Having someone else write the code is about as far from intentional practice as can be.
I do think the “becoming dependent on your replacement” point is somewhat weak. Once AI is as good as the best human at programming (which I think could still be many years away), the conversation is moot.
Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the United States have to speak English? They do not, technically. And in fact some small percentage don’t, but the vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.
I think it’s an elementary definition of stability. Just because the derivative of the function is never zero doesn’t mean it contains no useful information.
There is absolutely stability if you zoom out to the time scale that permits evolutionary adaptation (and of course, if you zoom out much farther it all devolves to noise again). But it’s specious to say that “the only constant is change” and then declare all comparisons moot.
I know this is somewhat antithetical to this article, but I’ve gotten similar vibes recently from Astro. Yes, I had to relearn some stuff, but once your brain starts thinking the Astro way, it mostly just works and feels closer to rails (but with the ability to craft weird fun JS experiences) than any JS tool I’ve used since Rails 4.
Can you explain how this is useful for those problems though? I'm struggling to come up with a way to use rank queries on embeddings in order to get back useful information.
I do think the “becoming dependent on your replacement” point is somewhat weak. Once AI is as good as the best human at programming (which I think could still be many years away), the conversation is moot.