This has nothing to do with Claude. Otherwise all other Claude interfaces would be putting out this response.
Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
141–150 of 411 posts
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not outdated. If you know the answer on how to implement Fibonacci, you are doing it wrong. Inferring the answer from being told (or remembering) what is a Fibonacci number should be faster than asking an LLM or remembering it.
> Inferring the answer from being told (or remembering) what is a Fibonacci number should be faster than asking an LLM or remembering it. Really? If I were to rank the knowledge relevant to this task in terms of importance, or relevance to programming in general, I'd rank "remembering what a Fibonacci number is" at the very bottom . Sure, it's probably important in some areas of math I'm not that familiar with. But b…
I assume in an interview you can just ask for the definition. I don't think the interview is (should be) testing for your knowledge of the Fibonacci numbers, but rather your ability to recognize precisely the recursive definition and exploit it.
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#143This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince…
Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#144The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge.
For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using async in Rust. It gives you ok solutions but the final solution came from the Rust forum (the answer was written 1 year ago) which I assume made its way into the model.
There is also the verbosity problem. Calude without the concise flag on generates roughly 10x the required amount of code to solve a problem.
Maybe I am prompting incorrectly and somehow I could get the right answers from these models but at this stage I use these as a boilerplate generator and the actual creative problem solving remains on the human side.
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#145I guess that's straight out of the training data.
Quite common on reddit to get responses that basically go "Is this a homework assignment? Do you own work".
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#146skidMark? what is this code? sounds like a joke almost... maybe it's some kind of April fools preparation that leaked too early
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#147“Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn’t matter as a much as a fact that I can’t go through 800 locs. Anyone had similar issue? It’s really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding”
We are getting into humanization areas of LLMs again, this happens more often when people who don’t grasp what an LLM actually is use it or if they’re just delusional.
At the end of the day it’s a mathematical equation, a big one but still just math.
They don’t “know” shit
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results…
_Kinda sorta?_ There's actually two things going on when I'm coding at work: 1) I'm writing the business code my company needs to enable a feature/fix a bug/etc. 2) I'm getting better as a programmer and as someone who understands our system, so that #1 happens faster and is more reliable next time. Using AI codegen can (arguably, the jury is still out on this if we include total costs, not just the costs of this one…
> In fact, the closest parallel for #2 I can think of us plagiarism in an academic setting. You didn't do the work, which means you didn't actually learn the material, which means this isn't actually progress (assuming we continue to value #2 (...)
Plagiarism is a great analogy. It's great because what we call plagiarism in academic setting, in the real world work we call collaboration, cooperation, standing on the shoulders of giants, not reinventing the wheel, getting shit done, and such.
So the question really is how much we value #2? Or, which aspects of it we value, because I see at least two:
A) "I'm getting better as a programmer"
B) "I'm getting better as a someone who understands our system"
As much as I hate it, the brutal truth is, you and me are not being paid for A). The business doesn't care, and they only get so much value out of it anyway. As for B), it's tricky to say whether and when we should care - most software is throwaway, and the only thing that happens faster than that is programmers working on it changing jobs. Long-term, B) has very little value; short-term, it might benefit both business and the programmer (the latter by virtue of making the job more pleasant).
I think the jury is still out on how LLMs affect A). I feel that it's not making me dumber as a programmer, but I'm from the cohort of people with more than a decade of programming experience before even touching a language model, so I have a different style of working with LLMs than people who started using them with less experience, or people who never learned to code without them.
Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#149Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
#150Hah, that's typical Sonnet v2 for you. It's trained for shorter outputs, and it's causing it to be extremely lazy. It's a well known issue, and coding assistants contain mitigations for this. It's very reluctant to produce longer outputs, usually stopping mid-reply with something like "[Insert another 2k tokens of what you've been asking for, I've done enough]". Sonnet 3.7 seems to fix this.
Is it being lazy though? Or is it accidentally parroting an actual good mentor?