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

forum.cursor.com

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

#201

Post by TiredOfLife »

ookblah wrote: post #97
motorest wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that h…

> this is nothing like SO

Agree. Ai answers actually work and are less out of date

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #183
TeMPOraL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by dagw »

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.

Duff's device hasn't relevant for over 25+ years and there is no reason why anybody who learnt to program within the past 20 years should even know what it is, while recursion is still often the right answer.

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

#204

Post by sycren »

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…

I think this boils the problem down solely to the individual. What if companies realised this issue and made a period of time during the day devoted solely to learning, knowledge management and innovation. If their developers only use AI to be more productive, then the potential degradation of intellect could stifle innovation and make the company less competitive in the market. It would be interesting if we start seeing a resurgence of Google's mythical 10% rule with companies more inclined to let any employee create side projects using AI (like Cursor) that could benefit the company.

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

#205

Post by Beretta_Vexee »

brulard wrote: post #171
IanCal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the world of interviewing though, it was the same a decade ago. The reason we ask people to do fizzbuzz is often just to weed out the shocking number of people who cannot code at all .

Yep, I still can not understand how programmers unable to do fizzbuzz still have a sw engineer career. I have never worked with one like that, but I have seen so many of them on interviews.

I have seen IT consulting and service companies employ ‘developers’ who are barely capable of using software to generate views in a banking software package and unable to write a line of Java (which was the language used on the project).

When the client knows absolutely nothing about it and is not supported by someone competent, they end up employing just anyone.

This applies to both construction, IT and probably everthing.

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

#206

Post by DrNosferatu »

zekica wrote: post #180
DrNosferatu wrote: post #163

Moralist bias: Then compilers are a clutch and we all should be programming in assembly, no matter the project size.

IMO, to be a good programmer, you need to have basic understanding of what a compiler does, what a build system does, what a normal processor does, what a SIMD process does, what your runtime's concurrency model does, what your runtime's garbage collector does and when, and more (what your deployment orchestrator does, how your development environment differ from the production...). You don't need to have any underst…

Sure - we just need to learn to use the tools properly: Test Driven Development and/or well structured Software Engineering practices are proving to be a good fit.

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

#207

Post by larodi »

Interestingly many here fail to note that development of code is a lot about debugging, not only about writing. Is also about being able to dig/search/grok the code, which is like... reading it.

It is the debugging part to me, not only the writing, that actually teaches you what IS right, and what not. Not the architectural work, not the LLM spitting code part, not the deployment, but the debugging of the code and integration. THIS is what teaches you, writing alone teaches you nothing... you can copy by hand programs and understand zero of what they do unless inspecting intermediate results.

To hand-craft a house is super romantic and nice, etc. Is a thing people did for a lifetime for ages, not alone usually - with family and friends. But people today live in houses/apartments that had their foundations produced by automated lines (robots) - the steel, the mixture for the concrete, etc. And people yet live in the houses built this way, designed with computer which automated the drawing. I fail to understand while this is bad?

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

#208

Post by K0balt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
andyferris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never thought about that - I guess the privacy cuts both ways.

That's not really a problem with LLMs, which are trained on material that is, or was, otherwise accessible on the Internet, and they themselves remain accessible. No, the problem is created and perpetuated by people defaulting to building communities around Discord servers or closed WhatsApp groups. Those are true information black holes. And yes, privacy and commons are in opposition. There is a balance to be had. I…

Unfortunately though it isn’t actually privacy in most cases. It’s just a walled garden where the visibility is limited to users and some big tech goons who eventually will sell it all.

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

#209

Post by IshKebab »

jeandesuis wrote: post #164

Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation: I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much. Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it…

It's probably learnt it from all the "homework" questions on StackOverflow.

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

#210

Post by risyachka »

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…

>> but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results without actually doing the work yourself in the first place.

yeah you can be more effective. Just have to pay the price of becoming more stupid.

a bit hard to justify

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