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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

#261

Post by perkele1989 »

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

this is not progress. this is regression. who is going to maintain and further develop the software if not actual programmers? in the end the LLM's stop getting new information to be trained on, and it cant truly innovate (since its not an AGI)

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

#262

Post by lfsh »

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…

As I understand 'reasoning' is a very misleading term. As far as I can tell, AI reasoning is a step to evaluate the chosen probabilities. So maybe you will get less hallucinations but it still doesn't make AI smart.

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

#264

Post by sshine »

dspillett wrote: post #252
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…

> 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 passin…

> Everyone seems to think we've magically jumped from ML into _real_ AI

But we have:

  - LLMs pass the Turing test more convincingly than anything before
  - LLMs are vastly more popular than any AI/ML methods before it
  - "But they don't reason!" -- we're advancing chain of thought
LLMs are AI (behaving artificially human)

LLMs are also ML (using statistical methods)

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

#265

Post by bluefirebrand »

sshine wrote: post #264
dspillett wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 passin…

> Everyone seems to think we've magically jumped from ML into _real_ AI But we have: - LLMs pass the Turing test more convincingly than anything before - LLMs are vastly more popular than any AI/ML methods before it - "But they don't reason!" -- we're advancing chain of thought LLMs are AI (behaving artificially human) LLMs are also ML (using statistical methods)

> LLMs pass the Turing test more convincingly than anything before

I know this sounds like moving the goalposts, but maybe all this does is show that the Turing Test was not sufficient?

> LLMs are vastly more popular than any AI/ML methods before it

Are we back in high school? Popularity contests?

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

#266

Post by beernet »

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…

This is a dinosaur's view. I guess there were people who said the same back when calculators were invented.

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

#267

Post by borgdefenser »

hakaneskici wrote: post #258
gazereth wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use to do the "hey chat" all the time out of habit and when I thought the language model was something more like AI in a movie than what it is. I am sure it makes no difference beyond the user acting different and possibly asking better questions if they think they are talking to a person. Now for me, it looks completely ridiculous.

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

#268

Post by enugu »

sshine wrote: post #264
dspillett wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 passin…

> Everyone seems to think we've magically jumped from ML into _real_ AI But we have: - LLMs pass the Turing test more convincingly than anything before - LLMs are vastly more popular than any AI/ML methods before it - "But they don't reason!" -- we're advancing chain of thought LLMs are AI (behaving artificially human) LLMs are also ML (using statistical methods)

The Turing test is meant to see if computers can functionally replicate human thought (just focussing on textual conversations aspect for simplicity).

The implications of passing the Turing Test are profound. Tricking a user with a 5 minute conversation isn't the same. The examiner is allowed to be an expert questionner.

For one thing, software engineering would quickly be taken over as a client can just chat with an AI to get the code. That is far from happening, even with all the recent LLM advances.

Similarly for literature, science etc. Currently, you can detect a difference between a competent human & machine in all these fields just by text chat. Another way of saying this is that the Turing Test is AI-complete and is a test for AGI.

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

#270

Post by SleepyMyroslav »

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).

Fun fact that we have burned those bridges years ago. Every time big codebase updates it's main optimizing toolchain (compiler/linker) ... there is nothing deterministic and predictable. There is only what has been re-tested and what has not been.
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