Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.shivs.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

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

#41

Post by jessekv »

beachy wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

I'm glad google didn't exist when I learned to code.

When I started at Oracle way back in the day, there was no Google. I was charged with building a DSL so that users could specify their own business logic and tax rules. I spent 5 x 16 hour days in a flow state coding in C and emerged with a parser that worked remarkably well, but was hideously slow. After sharing the results with colleagues, one of them told me about lex and yacc. I rewrote it and it went from thousa…

I wonder if whoever gave you that assignment also knew.

Sometimes I see a junior dev on what could be considered a "pointless" deep dive, and I keep my mouth shut.

It's the software equivalent of making your first kill.

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

#42

Post by kolinko »

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…

LLMs, when used by an inexperienced developer will produce code that has a ton of fluff and is difficult to read/change. The worry is also that if devs don’t learn to write simple code, they will plateau very fast because they will not be able to continue beyond what llms provide - this was also an issue with StackOverflow, but to a lesser degree.

Having said that, I’m absolutely pro using LLMs - it’s just a matter of using them properly for either education, or code writing. For experienced devs they save a ton of work writing boilerplate code and learning new libraries, for inexperienced they help overcome initial hurdles with grammar - and can teach how things work, if junior asks.

As a dev with >20yrs experience - vanilla ChatGPT produces code that has 80% too much verbosity, but with good prompts uou can cut down on that, and if you refactor what it wrote it is very useful - especially when dealing with unusual feameworks/languages. It’s also great at explaining concepts and “proper ways” to write code in new languages. It is very poor at designing novel architectures though.

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

#43

Post by williamcotton »

asdff wrote: post #28
globular-toast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the "big picture" part of software engineering, that is the architecture and design of a piece of software. It's all done in the head (and maybe on paper). Once my fingers hit the keyboard the code pretty much writes itself because the hard part has already been done.

I wish we got more affordances here with this side of the experience. The nicest thing recently I think are the idea of a directed acyclic graph that describes the system. But even these get cumbersome when many parts are involved and these are only presented in 2d and fully appreciated when they fit within your monitor. While it can be nice if these sorts of things can be visualized in 3d in virtual reality perhaps,…

I agree, I find it way easier to orient myself with a desk full of printouts and highlighters than 45 Word documents open somewhere on a computer screen.

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

#44

Post by tonyedgecombe »

beachy wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

I'm glad google didn't exist when I learned to code.

When I started at Oracle way back in the day, there was no Google. I was charged with building a DSL so that users could specify their own business logic and tax rules. I spent 5 x 16 hour days in a flow state coding in C and emerged with a parser that worked remarkably well, but was hideously slow. After sharing the results with colleagues, one of them told me about lex and yacc. I rewrote it and it went from thousa…

I lean't about lex and yacc from the O'Reilly shelf in my local bookshop. The information was available but you had to seek it out.

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

#46

Post by jasonjmcghee »

layman51 wrote: post #30
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…

Maybe I’m missing the nuance here but I don’t understand the arguments against “blindly copying” in the parent post. I agree it is probably not good to give up like the sibling post is saying, but at some stages you kind of do need to copy code blindly, no? You shouldn’t copy if you’re a student. But if someone is a working Salesforce Administrator trying to learn Apex as a first programming language, I imagine a lot…

Another distinction folks are making in other threads in this post is - in the situation where you are copying code, not using Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v but instead looking at the code and typing it out.

The thinking goes, you'll learn much more quickly if you go through the motions of typing it out.

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

#47

Post by johnea »

triyambakam wrote: post #26
johnea wrote: post #8

Me Too! and I was a high schooler in the 1970s... Since I'm close enough to end of career to be able to ignore the whole trend as a developer, I'm mostly dreading having to "talk" to some frikin bot everytime I need support on some product. If you agree that "customer support" system hell is bad already, then you have to know that this is all on the verge of being much worse... me: My payment keeps being rejected on…

I don't see it as very different than humans who must follow a narrow script. And scaling support is a good thing. And then there's still prompt injection in lieu of social engineering

I think the difference is that I would advocate for making it better, not worse...

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

#48

Post by globular-toast »

williamcotton wrote: post #43
asdff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we got more affordances here with this side of the experience. The nicest thing recently I think are the idea of a directed acyclic graph that describes the system. But even these get cumbersome when many parts are involved and these are only presented in 2d and fully appreciated when they fit within your monitor. While it can be nice if these sorts of things can be visualized in 3d in virtual reality perhaps,…

I agree, I find it way easier to orient myself with a desk full of printouts and highlighters than 45 Word documents open somewhere on a computer screen.

Yeah, or a bunch of textbooks and papers etc. I'll often have a book or two on my desk and many on the shelf near me. I find I can thumb to pages of interest from memory throughout my whole bookshelf. I've said it many times: the book is still the number one technology for reference. I've often thought it's about the practical benefits of having essential limitless space for these materials, but there is definitely also something about engaging our real spacial awareness capabilities for information retrieval.
Post reply on HN