Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

blog.ploeh.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 190 posts

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#161

Post by ltononro »

beej71 wrote: post #160
ltononro wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there might be a take on learning with AI vs the pressure to develop fast. AI could be an amazing tool to learn. But who wants to learn when you had to deliver 3 days ago? The corp culture is kind of what is killing it. Not sure how things are going in universities tho. If you stop and use it to learn, take time, ask questions. I am sure you can learn a shit ton out of it, most people were learning in the beg…

I'd quip this summary, only half tongue-in-cheek: "the goal was never to learn things".

well, does it all boil down to capitalism?

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#162

Post by apsurd »

jopsen wrote: post #156
sanderjd wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with the skepticism that we'll ever get to a point where natural language becomes the "formalism" and stop needing people who understand the actual formalism underneath. And I agree that you don't need LLM based tools. But things that you don't need can still be (and often are) incredibly useful . Nobody needs an IDE, nobody needs vim or emacs or bash or even compilers or assemblers. But we have all t…

Also not everything needs to be formal. I might want the REST API for a webshop to be solid, payment and checkout process, sure. But the UI. So long as the LLM doesn't falsify product information, why customize the layout, theme, look and feel for each and every single customer. Okay, maybe don't, but point is: you could take bigger risks, you maybe don't need to review UI changes as much.

The bit about "but the UI" sounds like a developer thinking "UI is a solved problem" in the same way MBAs are told "coding is a solved problem".

Product people do seem to think it worth exploring "personalized software for everyone" like literally each person gets their own custom UI. This does sound like a support mess but it's not obviously wrong when you think about the Microsoft Word alternative.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#163

Post by huurtehoog »

pferde wrote: post #146
musebox35 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's just it. you didn't "build so much", you didn't build anything. You asked someone (or something) to build it for you. How can people look at LLM-generated code and think "this is mine, I made this" is beyond me.

Agree wholeheartedly.

I'd like to add: we can't know a priori what will be needed to be known and what can safely remain behind an abstraction you just use.

That is revealed when our mental models grind against reality. Avoiding that friction at all costs is a problem because it will happen and you'll be unprepared when it becomes unavoidable.

Trusting some abstractions that have earned it but not all is how we deal with it. Limit your focus, and adapt. If you just trust all abstractions thrown in front of you until something breaks irreparably, you will be (person or organization) between a rock and a hard place and without any knowledge or skill on how to get out of that predicament.

That to me is the biggest risk in accepting the fallacy of general automation.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#164

Post by Izkata »

raddan wrote: post #27
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.

As a programming languages researcher I disagree. HTML is not just a programming language (a declarative one), it literally has the word “language” in the name. The world of programming languages is much larger than general purpose languages. Also, whether JavaScript is interesting is a matter of opinion. Given that for a long time it was the only web language, I’d say that makes it interesting. It’s also in my opini…

If we're talking about what's in the name, then keep going: it's a language yes, but it's a markup language, not a programming language.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#165

Post by j45 »

Learning to program is learning to think and still important to learn.

The current state of vibe or assisted / automated coding is still improving, it sometimes still can end up like cowboy coding gone wild.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#167

Post by johnnyanmac »

jappgar wrote: post #123
johnnyanmac wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are in fact finding out precisely why natural language sucks in real time, as we have all kinds of catastrophic errors with people who think this is finally the time for complex language to prevail over pesky nerd language. The only difference is that more people seem to prescribe to the "you're holding it wrong" handwave when said catastrophes are pointed out.

Plenty of catastrophes are available under pure logic as well. The only catastrophes they prevent are accidental ones. Natural language can build civilization around "do unto others as you would have done unto you". Logic cannot encode morality, precisely because it is unambiguous.

You are right, and that is precisely the issue. When complex logic fails, we don't usually blame the machine. When natural language fails, we as of late seem to be trying to anthropomorphize a machine that cannot be held accountable. As if understanding natural language suddenly means it understands morals.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#168

Post by Terr_ »

FuckButtons wrote: post #157
pferde wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just it. you didn't "build so much", you didn't build anything. You asked someone (or something) to build it for you. How can people look at LLM-generated code and think "this is mine, I made this" is beyond me.

I’m in two minds about this, in some sense they did and it’s the same way in which the C code I write is mine, but the assembly underneath is an artifact of my intent, but I owe the compiler authors for it. On the other hand the cognitive distance between my C and the assembly is likely lower, but that’s because I’ve spent time staring at what was generated in order to figure out why my code was misbehaving. Which is…

I think the difference involves how many layers of stuff someone claims is "theirs" and whether that claim of credit and expertise is valid.

Imagine a coworker writes some decent C code, but then at a meeting they start taking credit for the bytecode and the default optimizations done by the compiler.

That's analogous to people who write LLM prompts and then claim the same level of authorship over the code which was all generated and edited on an indirect level.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#169

Post by fwip »

LastTrain wrote: post #98
ah1508 wrote: post #93

A good question might be: what do I want to be ? A good prompter ? It's like someone who used to bee a good chef but is now good at ordering at uber eats. Even for a junior: being a good prompter may not be enough. We tend to think that we make a program, but (writing) the program also makes us what we are. It is what we do that defines what we are. "I think, therefore I am". I don't see a career path for a prompter.…

Prompting is an intermediate situation at best anyway. I think the most lucrative AI field going forward is going to be liability litigation since there will be only a small handful of AI companies, each the size of small nation states, who will need to be held accountable for what they unleash.

It will be a lot cheaper for the AI companies to pay lobbyists for a few years, so that they no longer have to take accountability.

Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs

#170

Post by devin »

jopsen wrote: post #154

To me software engineering was often about: how do we structure the project so that the crappy code the other students/co-workers write don't break everything? Not because everyone writes bad code. They do, at-least the do first time you read their code. You only think someones code is decent when you spent 3 hours trying to refactor their PR, and realized that the compromises they made were perhaps reasonable. (This…

At an even more fundamental I tend to think about software as managing _risk_, where complexity is just one component. A large portion of my career has been about making difficult decisions around accepting particular sorts of software risk to reduce other types of risk, like my coworkers continuing to receive paychecks, for example.
Post reply on HN