21–30 of 139 posts
In fact, generally teaching people to select the right tool for the job is a good skill to prevent them from using golden hammers.
Great to see a chapter on version control. It is such a shame that almost no CS program teaches proper version control. VCSs and the commit history can be such a tremendously valuable tool when used correctly. git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` an…
This feels harsh. Engineers have an endless list of other things to learn that are arguably more important, and it isn’t always worth understanding all the weird edge cases that almost never pop up (to say nothing of Git’s hostile, labyrinthine UX that one would have to deal with).
A compromise/synthesis: everyone should absolutely learn how git works internally, but not necessarily how to use the git-specific porcelain/tooling/CLI
Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time.
Is there any point in teaching aviation engineering when an LLM could probably generate something that looks reasonable from a corpus existing work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any point in teaching aviation engineering when an LLM could probably generate something that looks reasonable from a corpus existing work?
Most “cs” students don’t work in aviation, majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already.
Not necessarily going to be true by the time current first year students graduate, given that solved problems are most exposed to AI acceleration.
Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time.
You are still necessary to push the frontier forward. Though, given the way some models will catch themselves making a conceptual error and correct in real time, we should be nervous.
Great to see a chapter on version control. It is such a shame that almost no CS program teaches proper version control. VCSs and the commit history can be such a tremendously valuable tool when used correctly. git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` an…
Git is better than what came before, and it might be the best at what it does, but that does not mean that it is good.
- The interface is unintuitive.
- Jargon is everywhere.
- Feature discoverability is bad.
- Once something goes wrong, it is often more difficult to recover. If you're not familiar enough with Git to get yourself into that situation, then you certainly aren't familiar enough to get yourself out of it.
Many of those issues are due to git being a command line interface, but others (like no general undo and funny names) are simply due to bad design.
I think it is about time that we try again and build a better version control tool, but maybe git is just too entrenched.
Great to see a chapter on version control. It is such a shame that almost no CS program teaches proper version control. VCSs and the commit history can be such a tremendously valuable tool when used correctly. git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` an…
Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time.
To be fair to the parent poster, many people do seem to aspire only to be LLM operators, who will be a dime-a-dozen commodities accorded even less respect and pay than the average developer is today.
Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time.
Yes. Agents are good at solving densely represented (embarrassingly solved) problems, and a surprising and disturbing number of problems we have are, at least at the decomposed level, well represented. They can even compose them in new ways. But for the same reason they would be unable to derive general relativity, they cannot use insight to reformulate problems. I base this statement on my experience trying to get t…
They are completely, 100% useless, no matter what I do. Add on another layer of abstraction like "give me a function to calculate " and they get even worse. I had a small amount of luck getting it to refactor some really terrible code I wrote while under the gun, but they made tons of errors I had to go back and fix. Luckily I had a pretty comprehensive test suite by that point and finding the mistakes wasn't too hard.
(I've tried all of the "just point them at the documentation" replies I'm sure are coming. It doesn't help)