System programmer on AI erasing his hard-won knowledge: months of Claude beat years of C tricks
zack_overflow · x · 2026-09-28
- Quoting @theaiju's lament that a career's worth of C tricks, Verilog standard knowledge and math now feels worthless—"my entire pre-LLM output is like a few months of clauding."
- @zackoverflow shares his old practice: Anki flashcards memorizing bit-twiddling tricks, obscure Linux syscalls, libc implementation differences, kernel internals, and even magic hex constants so he could write UTF-8/UTF-16 encoders from scratch offline.
- He argues agents now hold encyclopedic command of all such tricks, so rote memorization matters far less—though it still helps in ways he (in a truncated post) begins to explain.
More from AGI Musings
- Plinz: claims of hard limits on LLMs are nearly impossible to prove — burny_tech · 2026-09-28
- Researcher Plinz: Everyone Predicting Hard Limits on LLM Abilities Ended Up Wrong — burny_tech · 2026-09-28
- AI Is a Scientific Instrument Like Telescopes and Colliders — Experts Still Decide Where to Point It — AllThingsApx · 2026-09-28
- Plinz: Defining 'thinking' to include humans but exclude LLMs is harder than you think — burny_tech · 2026-09-28
- Can a matrix solver think? X users clash over reductionist AI arguments — burny_tech · 2026-09-28
- Balaji backs Jevons paradox take on AI jobs, hits Yang's layoff narrative — beffjezos · 2026-09-28