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

Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#21

Post by j3k3 »

rossjudson wrote: post #20
royal__ wrote: post #8

These tools actually make me more interested in CS fundamentals. Having strong conceptual understanding is as relevant as ever for making good judgement calls and staying connected with your work.

This is the right answer. AI writing code for you? Then spend that time understanding what it is writing and the fundamentals behind it. Does it work? How does it work? If you can't answer those questions, you should think carefully about what value you bring. We're in this greenfield period where everybody's pet ideas can be brought to life. In other words... Now anyone can make something nobody gives a shit about.

"Now anyone can make something nobody gives a shit about."

lol nice one

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#23

Post by nilirl »

CS fundamentals is about framing an information problem to be solvable.

That'll always be useful.

What's less useful, and what's changed in my own behavior, is that I no longer read tool specific books. I used to devour books from Manning, O'reilly etc. I haven't read a single one since LLMs took off.

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#26

Post by remarkEon »

I was wondering about this. I do not write software to pay the mortgage, I just write the occasional python script, some SQL stuff to update various dashboards, R in my spare time when I'm getting ready for looking at baseball stats or something. AI has had pretty much the opposite effect for me. Watching it write something has made me ask questions, get answers, dig into more details about things I never had the time to google on my own or spend an hour or several looking through stackoverflow.

I'd say my ability to write code has stayed about the same, but my understanding of what's going on in the background has increased significantly.

Before someone comes in here and says "you are only getting what the LLM is interpreting from prior written documentation", sure, yeah, I understand that. But these things are writing code in production environments now are they not?

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#27

Post by TehShrike »

There are two types of CS fundamentals: the ones that help in making useful software, and the rest of them.

AI tools still don't care about the former most of the time (e.g. maybe we shouldn't do a loop inside of loop every time we need to find a matching record, maybe we should just build a hashmap once).

And I don't care if they care about the latter.

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#30

Post by lich_king »

wayfwdmachine wrote: post #16

"With powerful computers, I sometimes feel less motivated to study deep mathematical topics like differential equations and statistics. Computers can math quickly, which makes the effort of learning the fundamentals feel less urgent. For those who have been in the industry longer, why do you think it’s still important to stay strong in mathematical fundamentals?" Because otherwise you are training to become a button…

I don't find your analogy compelling. More like "calculators make me less motivated to learn how to multiply four-digit numbers in my head". There used to be jobs for people who were good with numbers. They're pretty much gone, and it's not even much of a parlor trick, so no one bothers to learn these skills anymore.

If the best argument for going into CS is that LLMs sometimes make stuff up and will need human error checkers, I can see why people are less excited about that future. The cocaine monkey option might sound more fun.

Post reply on HN