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I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

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Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#31

Post by NoPicklez »

alpha_squared wrote: post #6

I mentor a few recent grads and folks who change careers into tech, so I'll share here what I've told them for years. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering. You're hired for your perceived ability to solve problems the employer needs solved. Many times you'll solve it with code. Sometimes you'll solve it with process. In every instance, you're expected to solve it using your learned experience and…

True, to a degree but I think this reflects different levels of responsibility and experience as you grow in your career.

Coding is the primary part of the job particularly when you're a graduate, to solve problems using code and you need the skills to be able to code and solve basic problems using code. If you don't know how to code then you will struggle.

As you build that experience and grow in your career you begin to learn and have to capacity to think bigger and start to incorporating aspects of time, money, process and other business factors that you don't really have the ability to do if you haven't spent time in the arena.

I work with a lot of graduates in cyber security and many of them have very "technical thinking" but don't think about business tradeoffs of time and money when looking at security controls. That is primarily because they're still trying to harness their technical skills, which is what they will do early in their career.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#32

Post by ein0p »

30 years into this career I'm still learning to code, just different things than the ones I have started with. And without a shadow of doubt, AI is a godsend for me. You can have it code up a well known algorithm you already know in a different language, or for a different platform (e.g. GPU), or vectorized, or without dynamic memory allocation (for embedded) - limitless variation. If something is not clear in a language in unfamiliar syntax, just cut and paste and have it explain the idioms like you're five. Unfamiliar library which you aren't even going to need again? Just have it write a canonical usage example and go from there, and then ask for advice on how to do what you want to do. Take output as a starting point. Endless array of tools, filling the exact gaps most of us have. My son is a CS student, and I'm telling him the exact same thing as I just wrote - if you use this stuff _and_ your brain at the same time, it's a tremendous force multiplier and an absolutely unrivaled educational aid.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#33

Post by [deleted] »

ein0p wrote: post #32

30 years into this career I'm still learning to code, just different things than the ones I have started with. And without a shadow of doubt, AI is a godsend for me. You can have it code up a well known algorithm you already know in a different language, or for a different platform (e.g. GPU), or vectorized, or without dynamic memory allocation (for embedded) - limitless variation. If something is not clear in a lang…

[deleted]

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#34

Post by j_bum »

Great article. I share this sentiment and am glad I learned to code in grad school with only stack overflow as a spotty resource.

We can definitely date OP by his use of “rawdog”, the context of which is actually hilarious and made me laugh out loud.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#35

Post by UncleEntity »

Waterluvian wrote: post #18

I mentor a high school robotics team and they use copilot for Java coding and on occasion I’ve seen them write code that just kinda breaks the robot and then they’re totally lost for a while. But I can assure you, the alternative is there being no coding team and maybe no robotics team at all. I think that maybe I’d say: it’s good that AI isn’t good enough to never break the robot. That’s when they’re learning a lot…

> ...write code that just kinda breaks the robot and then they’re totally lost for a while.

Um, yeah, that's how I roll.

Try something, it doesn't work, debug for a while and maybe I can get it to work?

My favorite example was I was trying to get the python buffer protocol working for images in blender. I read the docs, wrote some code which didn't work, started debugging for a long while and, finally, after I went digging into python's repo I found out it wasn't even fully implemented. Needless to say I was less than happy they would let a half-baked feature into a release.

I can say the current batch of 'thinking' AIs are pretty good at debugging once you get them pointed in the right direction.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#37

Post by brailsafe »

kccqzy wrote: post #4

I think this really isn't about AI, but rather about the good self discipline as well as the willingness and perseverance to explore deeply. I have seen people who learned to code before AI, and yet because they don't bother to ask themselves another layer of "why" they continue to have a superficial understanding of everything. And I have no doubt that the truly excellent programmer will understand the whole system…

Ironically, as a more experienced programmer, I regret not manually writing every line as I read a book or watched a tutorial, and deliberately do that now. I compare it to thinking I can learn something by listening to a podcast; I can learn about something from a podcast, but to learn it at even a shallow level, I have to have at least more the most shallow interaction with it. Write the code, do it the hard way, then once you've done that, use whatever you want to help you do so more productively. This has coloured my perspective on many things, and has led to me distancing myself from "information" media, because it's often fake learning that costs you the time you could spend actually learning. I don't know where AI sits yet in relation to this, but my sense is that in moments where I'm trying to understand something at a deeper level, it's more fruitful to think about it as hard as possible first for at least a while before looking for the answer. It's not productive in an output per hour sense, but it requires a different intensity of energy that feels like better personal growth.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#38

Post by hattmall »

CharlesW wrote: post #19
alpha_squared wrote: post #6

I mentor a few recent grads and folks who change careers into tech, so I'll share here what I've told them for years. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering. You're hired for your perceived ability to solve problems the employer needs solved. Many times you'll solve it with code. Sometimes you'll solve it with process. In every instance, you're expected to solve it using your learned experience and…

> If you can't be bothered to deal with the easiest part of your job, writing some code, how do you expect to be trusted with the hard stuff? If writing code is the easiest and least impactful thing you do as a software engineer, why does it matter if you use AI to assist with that part? Or to come at it from another angle, why is using Stack Overflow/Google in the hunt for answers and examples good, but using AI mod…

I wouldn't say using AI to write code is bad at all. The problem is that it usually doesn't work in complex situations. If you already know what you want to do, feed it very specific instructions covering most of the bases then it can save you some time for sure. The main thing is you really actually need to know what it's doing to be able to reasonably utilize the output. If you don't actually know the capabilities of the code and you are stringing together generated output then that's bad. Just like it would be bad to copy large sections of code from stackoverflow. It's also probably not going to work.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#39

Post by genewitch »

gamedever wrote: post #24

Is this different than "I'm glad calculators didn't exist when I learned math"? I'm mixed. I did try to get gemini to figure out how to do some fancy TypeScript stuff. It provided solutions but failed to meet the constraints and couldn't get it to really get what I meant. It would say "Oh, sorry, here's one dealing with that" and then spit out code that either still had the same problem or ignored a previous constrai…

Gemini is far and away my least favorite llm. So far I've had OK luck with windows copilot for a simple react site. The site was done in like 2 hours but I polished it up while the person I did it for was copyediting their whitepaper for the "site". I had 5 tabs in notepad++ and was saving it to a cifs share so I could test immediately. React is pretty snazzy but js with its decorations doesn't look quite right to me yet.

I used deepseek-R1-qwen-distill-15B to do a nodejs discord bot. That was done incredibly fast. I had asked for a few days for a cellphone app but llama, openai (didn't test 4o or newer yet), deepseek didn't let me know that what I was asking was technically impossible - service workers without a backend somewhere so I could keep track of timers and fire notifications. Like a PWA.

After asking copilot about it the other way around "can service workers URL be file:///?" Apparently not.

All of the serviceworker nonsense LLM gave me the two-step - make change, revert change, repeat.

Re: I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code

#40

Post by jc_811 »

alpha_squared wrote: post #6

I mentor a few recent grads and folks who change careers into tech, so I'll share here what I've told them for years. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering. You're hired for your perceived ability to solve problems the employer needs solved. Many times you'll solve it with code. Sometimes you'll solve it with process. In every instance, you're expected to solve it using your learned experience and…

Absolutely agree. I went through this as well with friends who did bootcamps during the covid craze. After 3 months they understood how to code and the syntax, thinking that’s all they needed to be a “full stack developer”

When they weren’t getting any jobs I tried to explain that the syntax of coding is the easy part. The hard part is everything else.

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