191–200 of 326 posts
Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc. All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.
Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think - Steve Jobs
I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for pro…
I think in order to be a productive programmer with Claude you still need to understand what you are doing. Learning to code is a must. You need to know what is possible or easy to know how much you can ask. What will be less important is to keep your sword sharp. I notice that if code less for some time I do more one-off errors, copy/paste mistakes etc. With llm keeping the coding skill warm is less important but I…
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I take the opposite view but to the same conclusion. I've heard the joke "the more advanced you get the worse you get at math" from a lot of mathematicians. I'd bet most mathematicians can't do a long division problem without having to think pretty hard about it, because they've long since moved past that skill. All that said, people still learn and do manual math at all levels in order to advance the field even thou…
I think a major difference between math and software development is that software development tends to get easier after one gets through the educational barrier to entry, whereas math (and many other topics) become more complex/puzzly. Something that could highly accurately revert to the mean would be insanely useful when the overwhelming majority of what you're doing is mundane and has been done a million times befo…
If we're smart about this, maybe it means we get to do novel work a little more frequently. That said, I fear that a lot of people don't look at every single LLM output and think "Eh it's workable but it doesn't spark joy" and anyone who doesn't think that is likely going to be seeing their QOL decreasing. At that point your time might be better spent learning how to make Molotovs.
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For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue. LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a care…
> LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? People keep trying to make that analogy, but it doesn't really work because LLMs aren't deterministic like compilers and assemblers.
They’re not reproducible, nor are they even reliable right now.
> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.
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The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.
I think there’s potentially a future where software engineers learn how to “babysit” models instead of the details of programming. Kind of how software engineering students for the last decade at least haven’t learnt a great deal of assembly or cpu architecture. Maybe you had a unit on CPUs but it’s not central to the course. I’m not saying I like that future, but I can imagine it.
Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra? Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician. I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or…
These things were still indispensable on my path to being a mathematician though, they just ceased to be relevant as abstraction increased.
I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for pro…
Panasonic still makes laptops, enterprise use only, very expensive.
How is that relevant? Well, directly.