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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

#231

Post by rkuodys »

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…

For me the question is different- you can ask "how to become better coder" for which the answer might be - to write more code. But the question I'm asking is what's the job of system/software developer. And to that the answer is very different. At least for me it is"building solutions to business problems, in the most efficient way". So in that case more/better code does not necessarily bring you closer to your goal.

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

#232

Post by jstummbillig »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #131
jstummbillig wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is. Some knowledge and questions are simply increasingly outdated. If the (correct) answer on how to implement Fibonacci is one LLM query away, then why bother knowing? Why should a modern day web developer be able to write assembly code, when that is simply abstracted away? I think it will be a hot minute before nothing has to be known and all human knowledge is irrelevant, but, specially in CS, there is goin…

Not everyone does web dev. There are many jobs where it is necessary to have a vague idea of memory architecture. LLM are very poor in areas such as real time and industrial automation, as there is very little data available for training. Even if the LLM were good, we will always need someone to carry out tests, formal validation, etc. Nobody want to get on a plane or in a car whose critical firmware has been written…

My answer and example does not really care about the specifics.

I see nothing mention here as something that a human inherently needs to concern themselves with, because none of these things are things that humans inherently care about. CS as a discipline is a layer between what humans want and how to make computers do these things. If todays devs are so far detached from dealing with 1s and 0s (which is not at all how it obviously had to develop) why would any of the other parts you mention be forever necessary given enough artificial intelligence?

Sure, it's fun (as a discipline) for some of us, but humans inherently do not care about computer memory or testing. A good enough AI will abstract it away, to the degree that it is possible. And, I believe, it will also do a better job than any human ever did, because we are actually really, really bad at these things.

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

#233

Post by ahofmann »

gazereth wrote: post #188
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…

I'm going the exact opposite way. I provide all important details in the prompt and when I see that the LLM understood something wrong, I start over and add the needed information to the prompt. So the LLM either gets it on the first prompt, or I write the code myself. When I get the "Yes, you are right ..." or "now I see..." crap, I throw everything away, because I know that the LLM will only find shit "solutions".

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

#234

Post by breakfastduck »

motorest wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #21

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. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

> 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…

And they were right. People who just blindly copy and paste code from SO are absolutely useless when it comes to handling real world problems, bugs etc.

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

#236

Post by TeMPOraL »

stavros wrote: post #94
solumunus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate on what you think the issues will be? Why read documentation when you can simply ask questions and get better contextualised answers faster? Whatever edge issues manifest they will be eclipsed by greater productivity.

Because back in my day, we convinced ourselves that the effort was the goal, not the result.

It was also fun, though. Unfortunately, taking up programming as a career is a quick way to become disillusioned about what matters (or at least what you're being paid for).

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

#238

Post by wruza »

IshKebab wrote: post #209
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.

As a pretty advanced sd user, I can draw some parallels (but won’t claim there’s a real connection).

Sometimes you get a composition from the specific prompt+seed+etc. And it has an alien element that is surprisingly stable and consistent throughout “settings wiggling”. I guess it just happens that training may smear some ideas across some cross-sections of the “latent space”, which may not be that explicit in the datasets. It’s a hyper-dimensional space after all and not everything that it contains can be perceived verbatim in the training set (hence the generation capabilities, afaiu). A similar thing can be seen in sd lora training, where you get some “in” idea to be transformed into something different, often barely interepretable, but still stable in generations. While you clearly see the input data and know that there’s no X there, you sort of understand what the precursor is after a few captioning/training sessions and the general experience. (How much you can sense in the “AI” routine but cannot clearly express is another big topic. I sort of like this peeking into the “latent unknown” which skips the language and sort of explodes in a mute vague understanding of things you’ll never fully articulate. As if you hit the limits of language and that is constraining. I wonder what would happen if we broke through this natural barrier somehow and became more LLMy rather than the opposite). /sot

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

#239

Post by ashoeafoot »

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…

But in case of a halway collapse of human society , ai can play pretend society is still going on and recovering .

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

#240

Post by cm2187 »

946789987649 wrote: post #225
cm2187 wrote: post #21

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. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

You could say the same about Google, where there's an entire generation who no longer needed to trawl through encyclopedias to find relevant information. I think we're doing just fine.

Actually I did. Saw some kids just googling an exercise question instead of googling the topic. Trying to find the answer to the question while avoiding to understand the underlying topic.
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