Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#2If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't.
Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI.
Invest in fundamentals, learn best practices, be curious.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#3If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
I think there is a lot of room to leverage it, though resisting the temptation to have it do your work.
You can get it to provide feedback on code quality, suggest refractors and its reasoning (with the explanation rather than the full solution), basically treating it as an always available study group.
There is probably room for a course or book on a methodology that allows students to engage in this practice, or models with prompts that forbid straight completion and just provide help aimed at students.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#4If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
It's interesting you write this. I have a long experience and I use these auto complete on drugs now... I can't see myself writing all the damn code myself anymore.
I remember the days of using books, having to follow the code bits in the book as I typed them. I don't remember diddly squat about it. Same from years of stack overflow. I'd just alt-tab 12 times, read the comments, then read another answer, assess the best answer. Massive waste of time.
Use all the technology you have at your hands I say. But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#5If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
I agree, but I'll add that you can still use a standalone LLM window as a "teacher". If you don't know how to do something, ask it how to do it, and make it explain every piece of what's going on so you truly absorb it. But don't let it write the code FOR you, you should implement it yourself.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#6Apropos nothing, Annatar was a very good disguise for Sauron to use to gain the elves' trust but secretly have them forge something for himself.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#7Curious to try this as most other tools have fairly stingy free tiers where you basically have one good interaction and boom, now you have to pay.
(Zero analogies to drug dealers. Wink wink.)
So can this be used standalone or must you use JetBrains / VSCode / Firebase / GitHub with no other option? I am not seeing any.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#8If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
I think this is not a good idea or suggestion at all.
If i use google maps to find my way around, i'm faster by a lot. I also do remember things despite google maps doing the work for me.
Use Code assistent as much as possible but make sure to read and understand what you get and try to write it yourself even if you just write it from a second window.
In this age and pace, writing code will change relevant in the next few years anyway
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#9If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
It's interesting you write this. I have a long experience and I use these auto complete on drugs now... I can't see myself writing all the damn code myself anymore. I remember the days of using books, having to follow the code bits in the book as I typed them. I don't remember diddly squat about it. Same from years of stack overflow. I'd just alt-tab 12 times, read the comments, then read another answer, assess the b…
> But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.
But that's IMO exactly what your parent commenter says. Use LLMs only after you actually have a clue what are they producing. So if you are a beginner, basically don't because you'll not have any understanding.
Re: Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community
#10If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practice…
Ye you probably want to get grip on the fundamentals. My old college still have the students write some programs by hand with paper and pencil on exams to enforce this.
But, exercise pressure in courses will probably increase to recalibrate for the difficulty level. I feel LLMs would make you make assignments so much faster I don't think you can not use it.