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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

#241

Post by Kye »

alonsonic wrote: post #217
Nathanba wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well the only issue I have with that is that coding is already a fairly easy way to encode logic. Sure...writing Rust or C isn't easy but writing some memory managed code is so easy that I wonder whether we are helping ourselves by removing that much thinking from our lives. It's not quite the same optimization as building a machine so that we don't have to carry heavy stones ourselves. Now we are building a machine…

> Now we are building a machine so we don't have to do heavy thinking ourselves. There are a lot of innovations that helped us not do heavy thinking ourselves. Think calculators. We will just move to a higher level of magnitud problem to solve, software development is a means to an end, instead of thinking hard about coding we should be thinking hard about the problem being solved. That will be the future of the craf…

Calculators are a good example of where letting too much knowledge slip can be an issue. So many are made by people with no grasp of order of operations or choosing data types. They could look it up, but they don't know they need to.

It's one of those problems that seems easy, but isn't. The issue seems to come out when we let an aid for process replace gaining the knowledge behind the process. You at least need to know what you don't know so you can develop an intuition for when outputs don't (or might not) make sense.

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

(recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953)

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

#242

Post by nkrisc »

ookblah wrote: post #97
motorest wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that h…

> ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.

This is it. You will have real developers, as you do today, and developers who are only capable of creating what the latest AI model is capable of creating. They’re just a meat interface for the AI.

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

#243

Post by immibis »

andai wrote: 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…

You have to learn what's underneath the shortcuts, and then use the shortcuts because they are genuinely more productive.

I've heard it recommended that you should always understand one layer deeper than the layer you're working at.

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

#244

Post by wruza »

ahofmann wrote: post #226
gnuly wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most likely the marks of tyres in car/bike racing games on the road(the response mentioned about racing game).

I vouched for this post, because I don't understand why it was downvoted. Maybe someone can enlighten me?

There’s always some background enthropy on a forum, just nevermind and fix it if you feel like. People fat finger “flag” all the time as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged

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

#245

Post by GTP »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #228
c-linkage wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CTO asked the CEO what happens if we train these people and they decide to leave? The CEO asked in reply what happens if we don't train the people and they decide to stay? Any reasonably smart company will invest in its employees. They should absolutely be training you to be better programmers while you are on the job. Only shit companies would refuse to do so.

> Any reasonably smart company will invest in its employees. They should absolutely be training you to be better programmers while you are on the job. Only shit companies would refuse to do so. That's true, but by the same token, it's also true the world is mostly made of shit companies. Companies are just following local gradient they perceive. Some can afford to train people - mostly ones without much competition (…

This reminds me of a quote from dr. House. In one of the episodes with the smart girl that also studied mathematics (I don't remember her name), Cuddy said something like "You will figure this out, the sum of your IQs is over X". To which House replied, "The same applies to a group of four stupid people".

Sometimes knowledge and experience aren't additive: if none of the students had a certain experience/knows a certain fact, the sum of the students will still not have that experience or not know the fact.

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

#246

Post by immibis »

pif wrote: post #66
roygbiv2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI can't find it, how do we?

The actual intelligence in artificial intelligence is zero. Even idiots can do better than AI, if they want. Lazy idiots, on the other end...

We don't know what intelligence is, so we don't know that.

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

#247

Post by immibis »

jstummbillig wrote: post #89
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.

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…

Why should my data science team know what 1+1 is, when they can use a calculator? It's unfair to disqualify a data scientist just for not knowing what 1+1 is, right?

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

#249

Post by looofooo0 »

jeandesuis wrote: post #164

Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation: I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much. Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it…

Have you tried to be more rude to do stuff or manipulate it by stating it is easy.

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

#250

Post by yakcyll »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #148
DanHulton wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Kinda sorta?_ There's actually two things going on when I'm coding at work: 1) I'm writing the business code my company needs to enable a feature/fix a bug/etc. 2) I'm getting better as a programmer and as someone who understands our system, so that #1 happens faster and is more reliable next time. Using AI codegen can (arguably, the jury is still out on this if we include total costs, not just the costs of this one…

> In fact, the closest parallel for #2 I can think of us plagiarism in an academic setting. You didn't do the work, which means you didn't actually learn the material, which means this isn't actually progress (assuming we continue to value #2 (...) Plagiarism is a great analogy. It's great because what we call plagiarism in academic setting, in the real world work we call collaboration, cooperation, standing on the s…

> It's great because what we call plagiarism in academic setting, in the real world work we call collaboration, cooperation, standing on the shoulders of giants, not reinventing the wheel, getting shit done, and such.

That is absolutely not true. A much closer analogue of industry collaboration in the academic setting would be cross-university programs and peer review. The actual analogue of plagiarism is taking work of another and regurgitating it with small or no changes at all while not providing any sources. I'm sure you see what this sounds more akin to.

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