Debate: if technical gruntwork is automated, why pay to learn the skills to steer agents?
xeophon · x · 2026-08-31
A debate thread on the value of learning technical skills in the automation era. One side asks why anyone would pay to learn skills to steer agents if the underlying work is automated. xeophon counters that it's not (yet) fully automated, and without knowledge learned from inference experts you'd do horrendous things to GPUs; he further argues that just as no one is paid to learn arithmetic, once the gruntwork of becoming an expert is automated, the pay basis for that learning collapses. The other side holds skills just moved up an abstraction level: you debug differently now, but repeatedly seeing where agents fail still sharpens your prompting.
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