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Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

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Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#51

Post by [deleted] »

djoume wrote: post #24
dvt wrote: post #20

Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization." This is a relatively new fable invented by those that have participated in ritualistic interview hazing. Imo, there are, broadly speaking, two types of engineers: computer scientists, and programmers. Computer scientists do science. The end result is a new algorithm or theorem, and they work with lots of math, proof systems, formal…

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree that people have tendencies towards certain interests, I can't remember a time where I wasn't interested about computers, even long before I had access to one. That being said, people are also inspired by other people or by products, and there are ways to make the learning more effective. No tools is going to turn you into a good engineer, fata makes it easier to practic…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#52

Post by AmblingAvocado »

stbtrax wrote: post #50
AmblingAvocado wrote: post #16

Coming at this as someone who has stepped away from coding more than once for multiple-year long stints due to various career choices - I think the concern of "skill rot" is overblown. I stopped writing C++ professionally in the early 2010's. I came back to it in the early 2020's and it was extremely easy to pick up. Less like riding a bike, more like driving a car. The car got better over the last 10 years, but it s…

do you have any tips or strategies on picking up c++ after a long break?

For context, I was working in C++ when C++0x was considered exotic and a bunch of actually useful stuff was in boost, basically making boost mandatory - and the headache of setting up a project and tooling to do that was enough to push me to other languages for small projects.

When I picked C++ back up, I had a greenfield project I wanted to work on and I landed on this as a reference: https://github.com/AnthonyCalandra/modern-cpp-features. I just started working on my project and every time I ran into something where I knew other languages or libraries covered a gap, I would look through that guide and use it as a reference to bring it into my code. Smart pointers, auto types being two big ones. That, and threads, concurrency primitives - I remember hitting those and being like wow, you don't need a bunch of #IFDEF's to be cross platform anymore!

I also found there were header only libraries that were easy to vendor for things like json parsing, image processing, and thread pools. That saved me a lot of headaches, and created new ones! ha.

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#53

Post by Atotalnoob »

fabled-out wrote: post #17

This is very, very cool! Super impressed by what you've built. As a non-programmer who is now doing a lot of vibe coding for myself these days (and feeling very scared about which of my vibe coded things will just randomly break one day haha...) I feel like what I'm missing isn't necessary language syntax skills, but rather the higher-level planning/organization/architecture capabilities that a seasoned software engi…

You can change the output style of your AI agents, have them use a more learning and “tutor” style to improve your skills.

The coach could look at transcripts of old sessions and come up with real lessons for you to improve. Ask for book or article recommendations.

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#54

Post by hsuduebc2 »

dvt wrote: post #20

Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization." This is a relatively new fable invented by those that have participated in ritualistic interview hazing. Imo, there are, broadly speaking, two types of engineers: computer scientists, and programmers. Computer scientists do science. The end result is a new algorithm or theorem, and they work with lots of math, proof systems, formal…

Sadly the "ritualistic interview hazing" is just reality how you can get ordinary job today. Usually it have nothing to do with the job itself, it almost always could be solved by just ordinary dialog but for some reason. I don't know if it was someone from HR or some proactive manager thought it would be a wise idea to do this type of tests.

I just started to perceive it as an contest full of stupid useless semi relevant bullshit questions when you win the job. I'm kinda invested in the hate, because I'm currently attending interviews.

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#55

Post by akoboldfrying »

AmblingAvocado wrote: post #16

Coming at this as someone who has stepped away from coding more than once for multiple-year long stints due to various career choices - I think the concern of "skill rot" is overblown. I stopped writing C++ professionally in the early 2010's. I came back to it in the early 2020's and it was extremely easy to pick up. Less like riding a bike, more like driving a car. The car got better over the last 10 years, but it s…

This differs from my own experience with C++. I went from language-lawyer level knowledge (in some parts) while using it heavily (at work, at play and answering Stack Overflow questions on it) to forgetting quite basic stuff after a few years of no use at all. This was all before LLMs were on the scene. With that said, relearning is much faster than learning the first time, as the basic "shape" of things is still there in my mind.

In my defence, even Stroustrup acknowledges the language is too big and complicated, and it's continually getting bigger.

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#56

Post by knollimar »

dvt wrote: post #40
RealityVoid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization." Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems. > This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people I argue "cleverne…

> I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise. Even if I were to concede this point, it's certainly not honed by the kind of exercise that OP is advertising. We are deep in Max Howell's "invert a binary tree" territory here.

Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better and you don't deploy algorithms you don't know.

Invert a binary tree is kind of a strawman for the absolutist claim that you don't improve the cleverness by practice, but it's an example that not all the practice is useful

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#57

Post by AmblingAvocado »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #55
AmblingAvocado wrote: post #16

Coming at this as someone who has stepped away from coding more than once for multiple-year long stints due to various career choices - I think the concern of "skill rot" is overblown. I stopped writing C++ professionally in the early 2010's. I came back to it in the early 2020's and it was extremely easy to pick up. Less like riding a bike, more like driving a car. The car got better over the last 10 years, but it s…

This differs from my own experience with C++. I went from language-lawyer level knowledge (in some parts) while using it heavily (at work, at play and answering Stack Overflow questions on it) to forgetting quite basic stuff after a few years of no use at all. This was all before LLMs were on the scene. With that said, relearning is much faster than learning the first time, as the basic "shape" of things is still the…

The big initial hump I recall was syntax for writing main and what to #include, then header guards. That, and getting clang up and running in a docker on windows so I could use new C++ features and flags that were blowing up with whatever compiler I got started on. Once I was able to iterate things started coming back quickly.

Re: Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding

#59

Post by watwut »

knollimar wrote: post #56
dvt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise. Even if I were to concede this point, it's certainly not honed by the kind of exercise that OP is advertising. We are deep in Max Howell's "invert a binary tree" territory here.

Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better and you don't deploy algorithms you don't know. Invert a binary tree is kind of a strawman for the absolutist claim that you don't improve the cleverness by practice, but it's an example that not all the practice is useful

> Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better

Only up to the pretty low point. After that, it becomes completely absolutely useless. And people collectively spent astonishing amounts of time training that for job interviews long after the "absolutely useless" bar was passed.

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