ai will mitigate but not fully remove coders
Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
31–40 of 190 posts
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious - how do you explain the fact that as you look all around you, lesser number of devs are having fun?
Because for a lot of millenials and older developers coding/making thing by hand was the fun part. The endless meetings, scrum rituals, code reviews etc were the annoying parts of the job. Now they took away coding by hand, so what's there to enjoy? In a field that was already sensitive to burn out and churn taking the joy from the daily routine doesn't help with that. Only thing you can do is get in build something…
> The endless meetings, scrum rituals, code reviews etc were the annoying parts of the job.
Those are all self inflicted and not a necessary part of the job.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#33IMHO, I think that it could be better if the question about how to learn programming in the age of LLMs were asked to someone who is learning now by using LLMs. Someone who learned programming thirty years ago can perhaps give you only one side of the coin, whereas someone learning today from scratch using LLMs could give you good advice on what the real difficulties are and where the main drawbacks lie. Combining bo…
Difficulty is too many technologies available. So a beginner needs something/someone that teaches principles. I have realized that simplier (boring) is better. E.g. simple html5 css combo is better instead of trying to navigate in JS frameworks.
There is something to this.
But I think at least in front-end engineering, the bigger question is what a new dev values.
LLMs make the browser itself easier to understand in depth, if that's something you want. Building in vanilla-everything, no deps, is now doable at speed and scale for beginners too.
Once you understand the web stack and the principles, you can migrate to any framework and understand their "magic" fast. I think that's not a bad learning path at all, if you use it well, and results in a more competent web-dev than the previous pre-LLM cycle produced.
But if the beginner values output aesthetics and speed more than building their mental model, it is possible to spend years building things without developing any understanding.
For me, at least, the more interesting question is how can we make beginners more interested in the former path than the latter.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#34I said this in different ways before and got shoveled because of the way I said it: None of us know how to farm, not even the chefs who cook for us at a restaurant or fast food joint, but we eat every day and nobody's going around making people feel guilty about not knowing how to till soil and sow seeds.. In programming and other creativity, most people's skills will [have to] change/evolve into managing, directing,…
In which language a string would be a pointer to a pointer to a character?
Even in C, string literals are simply a sequence of null-terminated char, no pointer involved.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#35I said this in different ways before and got shoveled because of the way I said it: None of us know how to farm, not even the chefs who cook for us at a restaurant or fast food joint, but we eat every day and nobody's going around making people feel guilty about not knowing how to till soil and sow seeds.. In programming and other creativity, most people's skills will [have to] change/evolve into managing, directing,…
That’s one of the worst analogies I’ve seen lately
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#36It was much easier in the Age of Empires II Expansion Edition. Miss those times, too... :-/
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#37IMHO, I think that it could be better if the question about how to learn programming in the age of LLMs were asked to someone who is learning now by using LLMs. Someone who learned programming thirty years ago can perhaps give you only one side of the coin, whereas someone learning today from scratch using LLMs could give you good advice on what the real difficulties are and where the main drawbacks lie. Combining bo…
>whereas someone learning today from scratch using LLMs could give you good advice on what the real difficulties are
if we're talking about the LLM usage as described in the article, they can't do that by definition because they're not learning. You can replace the word "model" in the article with "guy I hired on fiver" and there would be no difference. They outsourced the building of a product.
If you're having robots lift weights for you at the gym it's a moot point to ask what the real problem with your form is, you don't even have one.
You can use an LLM as a kind of tutor to ask it questions the same way you'd google, but you can't actually substitute the programming if you want to learn programming
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#38"...I'd seriously consider learning carpentry, metalworking, gun-smithing..."
Those sound like hobbies? Outside of apocalyptic/utopian scenarios that is.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#39I said this in different ways before and got shoveled because of the way I said it: None of us know how to farm, not even the chefs who cook for us at a restaurant or fast food joint, but we eat every day and nobody's going around making people feel guilty about not knowing how to till soil and sow seeds.. In programming and other creativity, most people's skills will [have to] change/evolve into managing, directing,…
Yeah but should programming issues become "how can I be more friendly to the waiter so they give me what I want?" That's not what I want programming to become. I'd choose a different profession then. Maybe I'd become a surgeon because the AI labs haven't cracked robotics yet. And the people in general look up to surgeons and down to IT people, but that's another story.
Sadly, you will have to choose another profession, and as your example shows, the better paying ones need 10 years of gruntwork to get there.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#40I'm the author of Python Crash Course, and I got this exact same email this week. I was thinking of writing a public response as well, because any attempt to sincerely answer these questions takes something along the lines of a full post. It's also worth a public response because many people who are getting into programming for the first time right now are asking variations of these same questions. > Do I think that…
> Just five years ago, the only way to build a working project of moderate complexity was to learn the basic to intermediate concepts required to make an MVP.
> Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation.
Somewhat agree. Five years ago you could build an MVP without understanding how to open TCP sockets or how to parse HTTP headers. You didn't need to understand relational databases, let alone B-trees or cache locality. You didn't need to know how to install Linux.
Now you don't need to understand the details of connecting to Stripe or Auth0 or setting up a Kubernetes cluster.
> You have to intentionally build your understanding as you build your projects.
Some things you need to understand-others, not so much. Depends on what you're doing, the scale, risks, etc, but that's always been the case.