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Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

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Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#101

Post by Razengan »

latexr wrote: post #17
Razengan wrote: post #8

I 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,…

> I said this in different ways before and got shoveled because of the way I said it Are you sure that was the problem? Because to me it seems like it’s the argument which doesn’t hold. You’re engaging in what is called a False Equivalence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence Those things are not the same. Crucially, the food you buy at the store or restaurant is heavily regulated, provenance established,…

> False Equivalence or whatever

So is claiming "if people don't keep learning the absolute basics about everything they'll be stupid and useless"

Bruh we don't know shit about farming, how to milk an animal, we don't know how to mine, how to smelt ore, yet every day we enjoy the benefits of other people or machines doing those activities.

None of those people go around chastising us the way "real coders" are doing now. Though when automation entered their profession they probably grumbled similarly too… or did they? or were they glad of having to do such jobs a little less often?

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#102

Post by meowface »

agentultra wrote: post #76

“I built a thing with AI and I don’t understand it. I want to make changes and fix things and have no ability to theorize why it fails or how to fix it.” Oh my. See, you have to be able to program it yourself before you can build it with an LLM. Otherwise you have no way of judging the output. AI isn’t going to make you a programmer. Learning to program is. Interesting article. My advice is to do it the old fashioned…

A lot of successful startups start out with good ideas and atrocious, unmaintainable code. Current LLMs kind of let you speedrun that. Dutifully slapping more and more mud onto their week-old ball of mud. The sacred, canonical ball of mud they must faithfully preserve at all costs.

But the product will probably work decently enough. And as long as the humans are sufficiently devoted to testing and nitpicking and improving the product design and UX choices made by the LLM, they can get away with not caring much about its system design.

Also, by the time the code really needs to be rewritten (1 - 3 years), the latest models will probably be noticeably less bad at this. Humans who are persistent enough in their attempts to tip the model away from these basins already see at least some success.

Combined with other general improvements, model companies will probably find ways to do more post-training on not just "can it complete all of these isolated coding tasks with a 100% pass rate" but "can it consistently inhabit a mindset that values the art of elegant code and simple, clean architecture as an intrinsic goal over a very long time horizon". Perhaps in a way where a harness instruction can make the model especially tap into that mode.

You're right that even in years from now an experienced programmer will get better results with an LLM than a non-programmer will, but I think with each passing year that gap will slowly shrink. Learning programming will always only ever help, but if the non-programmer actually has sufficiently good ideas that they want to start working on immediately, it probably actually is a better use of their time to make the initial version before knowing anything about software development and then to teach themselves (real) software development as they continue working on things. I think this would be the case even if LLMs never got any better than they are today, and I think they're almost definitely going to get way better at programming than they are today.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#103

Post by bigfishrunning »

duendefm wrote: post #99
bigfishrunning wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we would have to live in a world where software engineering didn't matter. As an engineer who works very hard to do the right thing, I'm beginning to worry that software engineering doesn't matter. I write code that i think about a lot, understanding every line. It's not perfect, but I try to make sure my code is maintainable and well structured. I work much slower then my colleagues who produce unmaintainable slop…

It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt. I can give a simple example. I have a coder here that filled the crontab of a server with periodic tasks. One of them was doing +200 failed requests per second and shutdown one of our routers. The router wrote so much logs that it changed the health of its…

> It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, but convincing nontechnical management of this fact has been extremely difficult. It was hard in the days of the stackoverflow copy-paste monkeys, and it's even harder in the age of LLMs.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#104

Post by dack »

i might never know what it's like to learn programming after LLMs became powerful (I started programming in ~2002). But if someone forced me to give advice to such people, I'd say just start building things and stay curious.

That means, use LLMs to build whole sites and then dig in where you are curious. Look at the code, ask your LLM how it works and keep digging until you understand how the program is constructed. A benefit is that you're looking at a REAL program, not a toy example. And also, if your program stops working well (bugs or perf issues), you can debug it with the LLM and start asking it to teach you why things were slow and the concepts behind it.

I think you can basically build your own on-the-fly curriculum these days and do it with a real-world example WHILE you build cool stuff.

I think the biggest barrier will be motivation - many people don't want to be curious, and they just want it to work. they won't learn anything that way.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#106

Post by skydhash »

trey-jones wrote: post #94
falcor84 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The code may work, but there’s no guarantee about its behavior (including error handling and edge cases). But the painful reality is that we never had any such guarantees in industry code to begin with; despite decades of writing on software engineering best practices, software from the biggest companies is often bug ridden. My experience might not be representative, but when I do my "old man yells at clouds" routi…

This is exactly true in my experience. I find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work. Just like you would managing a team of junior developers, you have to keep an eye on the output, but I think the agent is more transparent about that than your team would be. And it works faster, and you don't have to deal with emotional meltdown or active sabotage if you criti…

> find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work

That’s the main issue. You’re talking about the development side guarante, while the most important is the user side guarantee. There’s a lot of talk about liking LLM interaction, but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets.

Which is why the most enthusiastic comments are about projects not released yet. Greenfield and released projects are different.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#107

Post by musebox35 »

senko wrote: post #40
japhyr wrote: post #5

I'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…

> Some things you need to understand-others, not so much.

This is the core of the matter though, knowing what you need to understand and what you can ignore is the actual programmer's skill. It requires you to have a clear mental picture of both what you are trying to build and what the underlying machine will do when you are finished.

You need to understand the abstractions, but also where they leak, when they won't match reality, and how. This is why knowing computer architecture and assembly helps you to optimize your code even if you are coding in a high level language.

The problem with coding agents is that they are tuned to work on all contexts so they always fill an underspecified request by optimizing the average case and often without stating all the assumptions that they make. So you still need to understand what you specified and what got filled in automagically by the agent. My experience is that they (even the paid frontier models) are poor judges of the most important assumptions they make, which will might be corrected by a prompt or a tool output in which case it is fine. Otherwise it will be ignored and steer the model into a weird loop. It then tries to fix things but can not do so since its mental model is totally broken now.

Do not get me wrong, I am so happy to let the agent handle tool building (especially those that involve a web UI) and fill in the CLI command line argument parser. But every time I trust the agent by relying on it to drive the mental model of what we are doing, I got seriously bitten. Well, maybe that should not be surprise me, but I can understand the confusion of less experienced programmers and non-coders. It must really be frustrating to be able to build so much, but also not to be able to fix seemingly small issues.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#109

Post by lolakutty »

utopiah wrote: post #77
lolakutty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>simple html5 css combo HTML is not a programming language IMHO. Javascript running in browser is not very interesting either.

> Javascript running in browser is not very interesting either. Damn... that's honestly a shocking thing so say, if only for the fact that you can run in JS other languages. But even then, if you could "only" run JS it gives you access to a high level language but also all kind of inputs, from a keyboard and mouse, obviously, all the way to MIDI, hand tracking in WebXR, etc and all kind of outputs, e.g. screen, obvio…

To me the Turtle programming language lot more interesting than Javascript in a browser. Sure JS has all the capabilities, but as I child, all I wanted to was to turn pixels on and off on the screen. With only that knowledge, and my imagination, I felt I could build whole worlds on the computer.

That is what makes something interesting and intriguing. Once I had the taste of that first pixel, and I was hooked.

But look at JS/Canvas stuff? I still need to look up how to put a single pixel on a canvas. I am not sure it is even possible!

(Btw, do you know that in those times, graphics libs could read the color back from an onscreen pixel? Now I can do collision detection for my games!)

But you might say "But that is the wrong way!" and "You won't be able to do much that way", Who cares, I want to have my way, with out having to do a ton of stuff that is seemingly orthogonal to what I am trying to do..

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#110

Post by testerius »

busssard wrote: post #54
DrewADesign wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re just talking about learning a programming language I think you need to be quite judicious in your AI usage. In my experience, people learn programming languages best by overcoming frustrating roadblocks. You often end up learning something important, even if it’s just about your mindset or approach, that landed you there. This is the difference between someone with a wet signature on their comp sci diploma…

>> If you’re trying to learn the language, fail. AI-coding tools are the deepl/gtranslate of coding. they might help you understand a foreign website/text better but you wont learn the language with it. and you will continue to be reliant on them until you learn the language. So when you dont have internet access etc. For programming, this was already true for many programmers before LLM. I wasnt able to do much with…

Yes, there is a funny PR in open source project about refactoring source code to assembler code or even machine code 0s and 1s. I do not remember exactly but I remember I LOLed hard when I saw it.
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