In some ways this makes Jonathan Blow's talk on the Bronze Age Collapse [1] even more poignant.
There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.
I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.
But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.
I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.
There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.
I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.
But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.
I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317