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Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

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Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#181

Post by cursor_it_all »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110
andai wrote: post #102

This 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…

> 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…

> that’s progress, not a problem.

Agreed. Most of us aren’t washing our clothes with a washboard, yet the washboard not long ago was a timesaver. Technology evolves.

Now, if AI rises up against the government and Cursor becomes outlawed, then maybe your leet coder skills will matter again.

But when a catastrophic solar storm takes out the grid, a washboard may be more useful, to give you something to occupy yourself with while the hard spaghetti of your dwindling food supply slowly absorbs tepid rainwater, and you wish that you’d actually moved to Siberia and learned to live off the land as you once considered while handling a frustrating bug in production that you could’ve solved with Claude.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#182

Post by khaledh »

Some time circa late 1950s, a coder is given a problem and a compiler to solve it. The coder writes their solution in a high level language and asks the compiler to generate the assembly code from it. The compiler: I cannot generate the assembly code for you, that would be completing your work ... /sarcasm

On a more serious note: LLMs now are an early technology, much like the early compilers who many programmers didn't trust to generate optimized assembly code on par with hand-crafted assembly, and they had to check the compiler's output and tweak it if needed. It took a while until the art of compiler optimization was perfected to the point that we don't question what the compiler is doing, even if it generates sub-optimal machine code. The productivity gained from using a HLL vs. assembly was worth it. I can see LLMs progressing towards the same tradeoff in the near future. It will take time, but it will become the norm once enough trust is established in what they produce.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#183

Post by GoblinSlayer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #148
DanHulton wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_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 s…

>most software is throwaway

That's only webdev and games.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#184

Post by williamcotton »

raincole wrote: post #167
andai wrote: post #102

This 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…

> effectiveness is a function of effort In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a mistake?

Is humanity itself a mistake? The fall of man himself? Are we to be redeemed through blog posts in the great 21st century AI flamewars?

There's a reason these technologies are so controversial. They question our entire existence.

These threads of conversation border on religious debate.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#185

Post by brulard »

genewitch wrote: post #113
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed a candidate with a degree in computer science. He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT. We never got to the question of recursive or iterative methods. The most worrying thing is that the LLM were not very useful three years ago when he started university. So the situation is not going to improve.

If some interviewer asked me what recursion was or how to implement it, I'd answer, and then ask them if they can think of a good use case for a duff's device.

Why? It looks like a reasonable interview question.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#186

Post by boredhedgehog »

alonsonic wrote: post #124
TeMPOraL wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress

> We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code

I have done some romhacks, so I have seen what compilers have done to assembly quality and readability. When I hear programmers complain that having to debug AI written code is harder than just writing it yourself, that's probably exactly how assembly coders felt when they saw what compilers produce.

One can regret the loss of elegance and beauty while accepting the economic inevitability.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#187

Post by moffkalast »

brulard wrote: post #139
andai wrote: post #102

This 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…

> because they're letting AI do all the work This is an unnecessary hyperbole. It's like saying that your reportees do all the work for you. You need to put in an effort to understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and put it to good work and make sure to double check its result. Low-skill individuals are not going to get great results for moderately complex tasks with AI. It's absurd to think it will do "all the…

Those damn kids, compilers and linters doing all the work for them. Back in my day we punched bits into a card by hand. /s

It's just people ranting about another level of abstraction, like always.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#188

Post by gazereth »

datadeft wrote: post #144

The 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 asy…

Personally I've found that you need to define the strategy yourself, or in a separate prompt, and then use a chain-of-thought approach to get to a good solution. Using the example you gave:

  Hey Chat,
  Write me some basic rust code to download a url. I'd like  to pass the url as an string argument to the file
Then test it and expand:

  Hey Chat,
  I'd like to pass a list of urls to this script and fetch them one by one. Can you update the code to accept a list of urls from a file?
Test and expand, and offer some words of encouragement:

  Great work chat, you're really in the zone today!

  The downloads are taking a bit too long, can you change the code so the downloads are asynchronous. Use the native/library/some-other-pattern for the async parts.
Test and expand...

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#189

Post by GoblinSlayer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #153
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For short term wins you pay with long term losses.

That's not true in general.

In general time management isn't trivial. There's risk management, security, technical debt, incremental degradation, debuggability and who knows what else, we only recently began to understand these things.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#190

Post by lr4444lr »

alonsonic wrote: post #124
TeMPOraL wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress

Things like memory safe languages and JS DOM managed frameworks are limited scoped solved problems for most business computing needs outside of some very marginal edge cases.

AI generated code? That seems a way off from being a generalized solved problem in an iterative SDLC at a modern tech company trying to get leaner, disrupt markets, and survive in a complex world. I for one am very much in support of it for engineers with the unaided experience under their belt to judge the output, but the idea that we're potentially going to train new devs at unfamiliar companies on this stuff? Yikes.

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