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Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

forum.cursor.com

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Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#111
post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

I think we already saw this manifestation a few decades ago, with kids who can't program without an IDE.

IDE's are fantastic tools - don't get me wrong - but if you can't navigate a file system, work to understand the harness involved in your build system, or discern the nature of your artefacts and how they are loaded and interact in your target system, you're not doing yourself any favours by having the IDE do all that work for you.

And now what we see is people who not only can't program without an IDE, but can't be productive without a plugin in that IDE, doing all the grep'ing and grok'ing for them.

There has been a concerted effort to make computers stupider for stupid users - this has had a chilling effect in the development world, as well. Folks, if you can't navigate a filesystem with confidence and discern the contents therein, you shouldn't be touching the IDE until you can.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#112
post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs.

from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree.

(to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them).

> I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better.

it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet.

i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah).

he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft.

conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him.

that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be).

so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end.

essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#113
post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

I recently interviewed a candidate with a degree in computer science. He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT. We never got to the question of recursive or iterative methods. The most worrying thing is that the LLM were not very useful three years ago when he started university. So the situation is not going to improve.

If some interviewer asked me what recursion was or how to implement it, I'd answer, and then ask them if they can think of a good use case for a duff's device.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#114
post #91

I recently saw this video about how to use AI to enhance your learning instead of letting it do the work for you.[0] "Get AI to force you to think, ask lots of questions, and test you." It was based on this advice from Oxford University.[1] I've been wondering how the same ideas could be tailored to programming specifically, which is more "active" than the conceptual learning these prompts focus on. Some of the sugge…

That’s great advice! A virtual office hours!

The brain is not a muscle, but it behaves like one with abilities you no longer use: it drops them.

Like speaking another language you once knew but haven’t used in years, or forgetting theorems in maths that once were familiar, or trying to focus/meditate on a single thing for a long time after spending years on infinite short content.

If we don’t think, then it’s harder when we have to.

Right now, LLMs tend to be like Google before all the ads and SEO cheating that made things hard to find on the web. Ads have been traded by assertive hallucinations.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#115
post #102

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince…

The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.

Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#116
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using your brain and a web search engine / searchable book index in your library / time or even asking a question somewhere public?

If it's been indexed by a Web search engine surely it's in a training dataset. The most popular Web search engines are the least efficient way of finding answers these days.

But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit.

Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#118
post #102

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince…

The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.

Time is always scarce.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#119
post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

Conversely, it's easier than ever to read said source material.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed a candidate with a degree in computer science. He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT. We never got to the question of recursive or iterative methods. The most worrying thing is that the LLM were not very useful three years ago when he started university. So the situation is not going to improve.

But it is. Some knowledge and questions are simply increasingly outdated. If the (correct) answer on how to implement Fibonacci is one LLM query away, then why bother knowing? Why should a modern day web developer be able to write assembly code, when that is simply abstracted away? I think it will be a hot minute before nothing has to be known and all human knowledge is irrelevant, but, specially in CS, there is goin…

The answer on how to implement Fibonacci is so simple that it is used for coding interviews.

Any difficult problem will take the focus out of coding and into the problem itself.

See also fizz-buzz, which it is even simpler, and people still fail those interview questions.

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