Sounds like a devious plan to turn me from a self diagnosed 10x developer (& Founder, CEO, Serial Entrepreneur) into a plain old 1x regular Joe.
Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
101–110 of 479 posts
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#102I don't know if retyping is the solution, but for me is clear that we need something additional to a terminal and a code editor. I envision a software that an agent can use and showcase to you how it did implement the changes and why.
The same way a colleague would do, focusing on the important bits, then ending with the trivial stuff. Something in between pair programing and code reviews.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#103[flagged]
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#104[dead]
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#105I wonder how effective it finally will be. At first glance it reminds me painting by numbers a d I'm not sure if that will help the real painter to keep his skills and surely won't teach aspiring painter much about the craft.
This is not about an aspiring painter though. This method is intended for an already accomplished painter. Not saying how effective it is but your comparison is not relevant.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#106When I got my first corporate job, I was placed in a group of 20 trainees in a rigorous COBOL course. We were given assignments and a schedule to complete them.
Most of us read the specs, then raced into the coding phase, hands to IBM mechanical keyboards. One guy took a different approach. He took a legal pad and pencil, and wrote his whole program on paper before he ever approached a terminal. He’d do his own bug checking and syntax checking, instead of having the compiler do it ( compiles took longer in those days, and required JCL ). He avoided the entire compile/wait/read-with-dismay/quickly-try-again loop.
He was one of the top students, of course. And a lot less stressed, as I recall.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#107I don't know if retyping is the solution, but for me is clear that we need something additional to a terminal and a code editor. I envision a software that an agent can use and showcase to you how it did implement the changes and why. The same way a colleague would do, focusing on the important bits, then ending with the trivial stuff. Something in between pair programing and code reviews.
Diffity has a “tour” feature that can be directed to explain a local code change. Walks you through the important bits of the change with explanations.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#108> manually retyping LLM-generated code This is just a miserable career of "paint-by-number" because people can't be bothered to have a creative thought about their professional work or programming hobbies. Software developers think that they are being clever with these kinds of strategies to "keep their skills sharp", but unfortunately the entire industry knows about this, and especially the upper management who are…
Right, it's just pretending to be able to delay the inevitable. It's like the assembly programmers of the 70s and 80s keeping their assembly-fu sharp. Yes it might come handy, and it's good to have a grasp of the concepts, but most careers have shifted to not needing to use assembly. Yes, I know that better knowledge of the low level would improve performance and efficiency. But people don't work with this any more, and the goal back then also wasn't to keep retyping a GCC output to keep the skill fresh. It was to get to a higher level of control and think about the organization of structured code, code maintenance issues, thinking at the level of how to make the C++ implementation.
With AI, our role also shifts. It's mainly to know what to spend effort on, to set priorities and, to be able to verbalize requirements, missing social context and unwritten rules, to anticipate what additional documents the agent needs, to prioritize deadlines, feature necessity, and other judgment calls.
We are right at the stage where our coding ability and review ability is still needed though, but this stage won't last long. Soon there will be as little point to a human diving into the code as to trying to beat a chess engine, or humans constructing buildings by hand. Of course the discussion and prioritization may involve looking at the code itself, to get a better idea of why the agent says that a certain feature would be tedious to implement in the current architecture, but then most people will just learn to take its word for it, just as you may want to understand a chess engine's step, but you typically wouldn't want to override it.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#109I don't know if retyping is the solution, but for me is clear that we need something additional to a terminal and a code editor. I envision a software that an agent can use and showcase to you how it did implement the changes and why. The same way a colleague would do, focusing on the important bits, then ending with the trivial stuff. Something in between pair programing and code reviews.
Right. I want an AI that sees my screen, sees my mouse cursor, has my audio transcript synced to the mouse movements, and it can similarly do TTS and and pointer movements or put things like circles and rectangles and background highlights on things while it talks, and slows down if I say so etc, like a human discussion partner.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#110This is what I'm doing right now to learn Electron, I essentially had Opus write me a tutorial to write the application I want to have, and I'm modifying bits and pieces as I go. It's been enlightening thus far, and the bot isn't always right so I still need to look up documentation on occasion.