261–270 of 387 posts
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I love all of this, but at least let your students use vi, it was around back then (or close). plus they don’t have to give it up when they go back in the real world, it’s an evergreen skill!
To be fair, it's mostly an evergreen skill because people don't know how to exit.
It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.
I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…
I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often calle…
I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years.
IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple editor, and ruby as the glue for numerous actions. So when I want to compile something, I just do, say:
run FooBar.java
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I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!
if it catches a lot of bugs maybe you’d be better of letting it write it in the first place :)
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Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.
im not convinced that it will. you dont notice it when you are only looking at your own harness results, but the llm bakes so very much of your own skills and opinions into what it does. LLMs still regurgitate a ton.
And insufficient talent because of retirement becomes an issue in like 30 years even with current developer demand, and I expect that demand to go down significantly over time, even with current level of capabilities.
This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…
Often when LLMs give me some command option or advice I haven’t seen before I try to independently verify it. And I’ve often been frustrated just how hard it is to find this info from the source documents. Though a lot of the time this is more an inefficiency of the documentation and Google rather than something only LLMs could do.
I’ve spent a lifetime teaching myself programming, computers, and engineering. I have no formal education in these disciplines and find that I excel due to the self-taught nature of my background.
I take a very metered approach to AI and use it for autocomplete while still scrutinizing every token (not the AI kind) as well as an augment to my self-pedagogy. It’s great to be able to “query” or get a summary from a set of technical documents on demand.
However, I don’t understand the desire to remove oneself from the process with AI. I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills.
There’s more to engineering than simply programming. Both the engineer and the intended user base must also understand the system. The value lost is greater than the sum of all the parts when an LLM produces most or all of the code.
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if it catches a lot of bugs maybe you’d be better of letting it write it in the first place :)
It also writes lots of bugs which it'll catch some of, in an independent review chat. This is bogus. If you think LLMs write less buggy software, you haven't worked with seriously capable engineers. And now, of course, everyone can become such an engineer if they put in the effort to learn. But why not just use the AI? Because you can still use the AI once you're seriously good.
Perhaps because the jury is still out on whether one can become “seriously good” by using AI if they weren’t before.
I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…
From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007. If we assume that there are 5…