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Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#51

Post by jraph »

input_sh wrote: post #31
everfrustrated wrote: post #16

So long as you can prompt your AI to successfully debug your way out of problems - you don't need to understand code. I appreciate this will be a deeply controversial statement here. As someone who's been coding for 25+ years and has some part of my identity in my ability to code this hurts and wounds me, but it is sadly true. The skills I've built and honed have little value in this new market. This must be how musi…

So long as you can navigate someone from the passenger seat, you don't need to know how to drive a car. I've been an experienced driver myself, but in the age of self-driving cars it's just not a useful skillset to have. A car is just a means to an end, why learn how to drive it when you can simply hop into a taxi? The answer: because people find joy in doing it themselves.

> why learn how to drive it when you can simply hop into a taxi?

Because hopping into a taxi is kinda expensive, most can't do that daily.

> in the age of self-driving cars it's just not a useful skillset to have

Self-driving cars are not there yet, especially as there are somewhat unpredictable human beings still driving around and imperfect infra. Laws are also not really there yet around the world too.

Self-driving is also kinda a black box that you don't really have control on, especially as long as these cars are connected to the mother company.

In a way, most of that is mostly true for programming and Gen AI as well (and Gen AI might become expensive as well), so your analogy might be quite apt in the end xD

Otherwise,

> because people find joy in doing it themselves

Many people seem to enjoy it indeed. I'd be perfectly happy delegating driving. I can like driving, but I don't enjoy the responsibility and the risk that I mess something up.

I do enjoy programming myself though :-)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#52

Post by jbloggs777 »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #19
marcus_holmes wrote: post #14

I taught myself to code as a teenager back in the 80's on those early microcomputers (Commodore PET, Acorn Atom, BBC micro). Everything was much simpler, and easier to learn. A career in software development 30+ years later, and I'm back learning from day one again, because LLMs are profoundly changing how we do this. Example: two years ago, I built a website as an MVP to test a hypothesis about our customers. It too…

This is unbelievably depressing. Why to learn any skills at all, since some model is going to do it pretty soon and companies only need bunch of sales people, your Musk’s and Bezos’, to sell that crap. Rest of us rotten our brains online living on goverment hand-outs and designer drugs.

Why learn to play the drums, when there are drum machines? Or play any music, when there are MP3s? Or cook, when there's microwave dinners?

If you can't answer the above, you might want to have a chat with a psychologist. We can and do create meaning in our own lives.

Programming will change, but I won't miss creating the same boilerplate again and again. I expect to focus more on translating the business & technical requirements to decent quality results. I expect good interfaces and separation of concerns will be even more important, as whole modules might be rewritten from scratch rather than being modified, changing the way we think about maintainable code.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#53

Post by austin-cheney »

WTF. If you really feel that way then stop using AI. Either you are building confidence or you aren’t.

Now, step back and do some serious introspection. First, look around. Odds are you are surrounded by imposters, irrespective of AI. Identify who the imposters are and isolate yourself from them. Secondly, solve hard problems. Confidence comes from learning. If you cannot perform without AI then your learning is low.

At the end of the day you provide solutions to problems. If you cannot do that almost instantly in your mind, forming a vision, you are less valuable than someone who can.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#54

Post by 1jreuben1 »

You never stop learning to code. Experimenting with LeetCode and ClaudeCode - revising the landscape of DS&A (again) enough to steer the which, when and what, and validate the how. Eg: I know what a SkipList does, when to use and fuzzily how it works. The hardest thing about leetcode: 1) knowing you will forget it 2) knowing you will never use it much 3) knowing you are forgoing time to learn other stuff 4) knowing that AI makes knowing it redundant

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#55

Post by journal »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #4

If you can’t code without an AI then you don’t really know how to code. It’s important to learn skills manually before automating them.

If you can't do math without a calculator then you really don't know math, but when does that matter?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#56

Post by keepamovin »

jraph wrote: post #47
keepamovin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a little bit of a humorous tease however, I think there’s a side to it you’re missing as valid is what you say right now is.

> It was a little bit of a humorous tease Whoops, missed that, sorry for this! Not sure I understand the rest of your sentence, I understand that you are saying what I'm saying is only valid right now but could change as Gen AI keep improving. I personally think this stuff significantly improving will require a breakthrough / paradigm shift, and that the "sophisticated stochastic parrot" model, even with "reasoning"…

Hey bud I'm with you there on the next gen breakthroughs requiring more than the current models + reasoning, tho they do take it pretty far. Re the sentence: s/as valid is/as valid as/, but yeah you got me even with the error!

I think truly next gen requires embodiment so systems can learn emotions and consequences, plus reason from their own perspective. I also think the NLP processing can be radically simplified to make training/inference way lower cost. There's also probably another layer we haven't grokked yet, maybe something like NLP/transformers on abstract non linguistic symbolic reasoning, that emerges from linguistics and world models/embodied experience, to truly refine this to the ideal of intellect we are seeking. That should open the gate to AGI, tho there's probably some other magic x-factor step to take a perfectly intelligent individuated synthetic consciousness (in a robot body) to whatever we want from AGI tho. Idk, what do you think? :)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#57

Post by jgammell »

My university made us learn to code 'close to the metal' and IMO this is a great way to gain an understanding of what is actually going on. Program in C, no IDE, no AI tools.

The AI tools are incredibly helpful (and people who say otherwise are disengenuous), but if you don't already roughly know how you want to implement something and you let AI take the wheel, you aren't going to learn anything. From a learning standpoint I feel like the best approach is to plan and write your code without using AI at all, then maybe use it as a critic to give feedback on what you've done.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#58

Post by incomingpain »

I've been coding since about 2009.

If someone were to ask me how to learn to code today. I dont know what I would say. My gut is telling me to say go into farming or marketing. vs ALL-IN. Down the rabbit hole you go.

>I often see people say that the solution is to just fully learn to code without AI, (i.e, go "cold turkey"), which may be the best, but I wonder if the optimal path is somewhere in between given that AI is clearlly changing the game here in terms of what it means to be a programmer.

You need to know the fundamentals. You probably still need to learn to code manually. Thonny is the best beginner IDE.

You will want to switch over to AI pretty quick though. As a beginner, you probably want GUI, so Antigravity, Codex, or Claude Code.

>I have shipped a few projects, I always review AI-suggested code, do daily coding practice without AI, watch youtube videos, etc. but still don't know if I'm striking the right balance or whether I can really call myself a programmer.

There is no license. You can call yourself that whenever you please. Here's a relevant hacker news blog though: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

>I'm curious how you have all handled this balancing act in the past few years. More concretely, what strategies do you use to both be efficient and able to ship / move quickly while ensuring you are also taking the time to really process and understand and learn what you are doing?

Once you really get your AI coding skill up and you know your model. You have the rocksolid architecture/design. You tend to be more concerned with the model deleting 1000 lines accidentally.

But then openclaw bursts onto the scene and we dont need to know how to code anymore? Like I give it a task, ask if it has a skill, it says no. It goes to gemini cli, creates its own skill. It's now giving me updates on changes. I didnt do anything.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

#60

Post by 1718627440 »

journal wrote: post #55
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #4

If you can’t code without an AI then you don’t really know how to code. It’s important to learn skills manually before automating them.

If you can't do math without a calculator then you really don't know math, but when does that matter?

When you want to do function discussions or learn calculus.
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