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

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

#171

Post by brulard »

IanCal wrote: post #96
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #70

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.

This is just the world of interviewing though, it was the same a decade ago. The reason we ask people to do fizzbuzz is often just to weed out the shocking number of people who cannot code at all .

Yep, I still can not understand how programmers unable to do fizzbuzz still have a sw engineer career. I have never worked with one like that, but I have seen so many of them on interviews.

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

#172

Post by noisy_boy »

datadeft wrote: post #144

The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge. For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using asy…

For Claude, set up a custom prompt which should have whatever you want + this:

"IMPORTANT: Do not overkill. Do not get distracted. Stay focused on the objective."

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

#173

Post by aa-jv »

solumunus wrote: post #58
cm2187 wrote: 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.

Please elaborate on what you think the issues will be? Why read documentation when you can simply ask questions and get better contextualised answers faster? Whatever edge issues manifest they will be eclipsed by greater productivity.

The issue is, glib understanding replaces actual application.

Its one thing to have the AI work through the materials and explain it.

Its another thing to have lost a lot of the background information required to sustain that explanation.

Greater productivity, is of course, a subjective measure. If that's all that matters, then being glib is perfectly acceptable. But, the value of that productivity may change in a different context - for example, I find it very difficult to go back to AI-generated code some months later, and understand it - unless I already took the time earlier to discern the details.

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

#175

Post by aa-jv »

kasey_junk wrote: post #168
aa-jv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked early in my career with a developer who printed out every part of the codebase to review and learn it. He viewed text search tools, file delineations, and folder structures as crutches best avoided.

Yes indeed, that is a perfectly reasonable approach to take, especially in the world of computing where rigorous attention to detail is often rewarded with extraordinary results.

I have very early (and somewhat fond) memories of reviewing every single index card, every single hole in the punch-tape, every single mnemonic, to ensure there were no undiscovered side-effects.

However, there is a point where the directory structure is your friend, you have to trust your colleagues ability to understand the intent behind the structure, and you can leverage the structure to gain great results.

Always remember: software is a social construct, and is of no value until it is in the hands of someone else - who may, or may not, respect the value of understanding it...

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

#176

Post by ljm »

buckyfuller wrote: post #61
dagw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.

How does this make sense when you can put any book inside of an LLM?

Learning isn't just about rote memorisation of information but the continuous process of building your inquisitive skills.

An LLM isn't a mind reader so if you never learn how to seek the answers you're looking for, never curious enough to dig deeper, how would you ever break through the first wall you hit?

In that way the LLM is no different than searching Google back when it was good, or even going to a library.

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

#177

Post by jon-wood »

strken wrote: post #128
usrbinbash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. No, it wasn't. What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day. SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource.…

Yes, they were, for reasons that have turned out to be half-right and half-wrong. At least by some people. Ctrl-c ctrl-v programming was widely derided, but people were also worried about a general inability to RTFM. I had the good fortune to work with a man who convinced me to go read the spec of some of the programming languages I used. I'm told this was reasonably common in the days of yore, but I've only rarely w…

I also try to read the specification or manual for tools I use, and find the biggest benefit is simply knowing what that tool is capable of, and what the recommended approach to a given problem is when using that tool. Even just skimming the modules available in a language's standard library can get you a long way.

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

#178

Post by noisy_boy »

MortyWaves wrote: post #154
datadeft wrote: post #144

The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge. For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using asy…

I agree completely with all you said however Claude solved a problem I had recently in a pretty surprising way. So I’m not very experienced with Docker and can just about make a Docker Compose file. I wanted to setup cron as a container in order to run something on a volume shared with another container. I googled “docker compose cron” and must have found a dozen cron images. I set one up and it worked great on X86 a…

Maybe you would have figured it out if you thought a bit more deeply about what you wanted to achieve.

You want to schedule things. What is the basic tool we use to schedule on Linux? Cron. Do you need to install it separately? No, it usually comes with most Linux images. What is your container, functionally speaking? A working Linux system. So you can run scripts on it. Lot of these scripts run binaries that come with Linux. Is there a cron binary available? Try using that.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 but breaking objectives down to their basic core can be helpful.

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

#179

Post by orbital-decay »

boxed wrote: post #150
orbital-decay wrote: post #126

Hah, that's typical Sonnet v2 for you. It's trained for shorter outputs, and it's causing it to be extremely lazy. It's a well known issue, and coding assistants contain mitigations for this. It's very reluctant to produce longer outputs, usually stopping mid-reply with something like "[Insert another 2k tokens of what you've been asking for, I've done enough]". Sonnet 3.7 seems to fix this.

Is it being lazy though? Or is it accidentally parroting an actual good mentor?

Not really, these assistants are all trained as yes-men, and the training usually works well.

It might be a conflict between shorter outputs and the "soft reasoning" feature that version of Sonnet has, where it stops mid-reply and reflects on what it has written, in an attempt to reduce hallucinations. I don't know what exactly triggers it, but if it triggers in the middle of the long reply, it notices that it's already too long (which is an error according to its training) and stops immediately.

(Or maybe I'm entirely wrong here!)

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

#180

Post by zekica »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #163

Moralist bias: Then compilers are a clutch and we all should be programming in assembly, no matter the project size.

IMO, to be a good programmer, you need to have basic understanding of what a compiler does, what a build system does, what a normal processor does, what a SIMD process does, what your runtime's concurrency model does, what your runtime's garbage collector does and when, and more (what your deployment orchestrator does, how your development environment differ from the production...).

You don't need to have any understanding on how it works in any detail or how to build such a system yourself, but you need to know the basics.

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