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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

#251

Post by moffkalast »

Tainnor wrote: post #219
moffkalast wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those other levels of abstraction that you mentioned are deterministic and predictable . I think that's a massive difference and it justifies why one should be more skeptical towards AI generated code (skeptical doesn't mean "outright dismissing" tbf).

Deterministic tab completion generates horseshit half the time too, at the end of the day you have to know what you're doing in either case imo. You can also run an LLM in deterministic mode, but performance is usually worse.

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

#252

Post by dspillett »

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 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 without actually doing the work yourself in the first place.

This has been going on for decades. It is called outsourcing development. We've just previously passed the work to people in countries with lower wages and conditions, now people are increasingly passing the work to a predictive text engine (either directly, or because that is what the people they are outsourcing to are doing).

Personally I'm avoiding the “AI” stuff¹, partly because I don't agree with how most of the models were trained, partly because I don't want to be beholden to an extra 3rd party commercial entity to be able to do my job, but mainly because I tinker with tech because I enjoy it. Same reason I've always avoided management: I want to do things, not tell others to do things. If it gets to the point that I can't work in the industry without getting someone/something else to do the job for me, I'll reconsider management or go stack shelves!

--------

[1] It is irritating that we call it AI now because the term ML became unfashionable. Everyone seems to think we've magically jumped from ML into _real_ AI which we are having to make sure we call something else (AGI usually) to differentiate reasoning from glorified predictive text.

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

#253

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

eMPee584 wrote: post #194
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's unwise to naively copy code from either stack overflow or an AI, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the one that had been peer-reviewed by other humans every time.

Ooh, the quality of "review" on SO also varies a whole lot..

Sure, I was more thinking of the original intent, and the early-days quality, than the current state of it. But I'd still take some review over none!

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

#254

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

pif wrote: post #66
roygbiv2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI can't find it, how do we?

The actual intelligence in artificial intelligence is zero. Even idiots can do better than AI, if they want. Lazy idiots, on the other end...

We need to optimise for lazy though — lazy programmers are the best! Idiots, though, less so.

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

#255

Post by ncruces »

block_dagger wrote: post #87
opan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues I see are that private chats are information blackholes whereas public stuff like SO can show up in a search and help more than just the original asker (can also be easily referenced / shared). Also the fact that these chatbots are wrong / make stuff up a lot.

LLMs are trained on public data though.

Only if for as long as public data continues to exist.

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

#256

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

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.

Unless you're also a programmer, it's very difficult to judge someone else's programming ability. I've worked places where I was the only remotely-technical person there, and it would have been easy to fake it with enough confidence and few enough morals.

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

#257

Post by barrkel »

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…

You're half right. Reuse is one half of plagiarism. But it's not the crucial thing which gives meaning to the word: lack of attribution and passing it off as your own. This is the moral wrong. It would be wrong in a work context too, taking credit for the work of others.

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

#258

Post by hakaneskici »

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 have heard a few times that "being nice" to LLMs sometimes improves their output quality. I find this hard to believe, but happy to hear your experience.

Examples include things like, referring to LLM nicely ("my dear"), saying "please" and asking nicely, or thanking.

Do these actually work?

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

#259

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

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.

That's a great question because there are 3 levels of answer: 1) I don't know what recursion is 2) This is what recursion is 3) This is what iteration is

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

#260

Post by CharlieDigital »

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h

I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard.

This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent on AI copilots that what should have been an easy task was seen as insurmountably hard because the LLM didn't have info on this new-ish library.

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