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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

#291

Post by lupire »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #186
alonsonic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress

> We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code I have done some romhacks, so I have seen what compilers have done to assembly quality and readability. When I hear programmers complain that having to debug AI written code is harder than just writing it yourself, that's probably exactly how assembly coders felt when they saw what compilers produce. One can regret the loss of elegance and beauty while acc…

Not just elegance and beauty, but also functionality. AI is as victim as humans are that if you put all your maximum wit into coding, you won't have any headroom for debugging.

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

#292

Post by lupire »

Kye wrote: post #241
alonsonic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 k…

Complaining about "order of operations" is equivalent to saying Spanish speakers are ignorant because they don't know French.

It's especially silly because one thing calculators are known for is being inconsistent about order of operations between designs.

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

#293

Post by CharlieDigital »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #271
CharlieDigital wrote: post #260

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent…

Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.

I also didn't know the library nor have any exposure (yesterday was literally my first time looking at the docs for this particular library) and still got it done in 1.5h because someone has to do it.

And they've been at the company working with the FE stack longer than me by a few months!

I'm not even on the frontend team and decided to take the matter into my hands because I was pretty sure my ask wasn't too onerous so I wanted to double check. It had an out-of-the-box, first party add on package to do exactly what we needed to get data in the right shape on the backend, but the dev made it seem like I was pushing more work on FE. I'm just trying to get the right data format...

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

#294

Post by motorest »

usrbinbash wrote: post #81
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…

> 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.…

> SO is a valueable resource.

Chatbots like Copilot, Cursor, Mistral, etc serve the same purpose that StackOverflow does. They do a far better job at it, too.

> The problem is not using the tools available. The problem is relying 100% on these tools, with no skill or care of ones own.

Nonsense. The same blend of criticism was at one point directed at IDEs and autocompletion. The common thread is ladder-pullers complaining how the new generation doesn't use the ladders they've used.

I repeat: we old timers need to do better.

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

#295

Post by Nullabillity »

SleepyMyroslav wrote: post #270
Tainnor wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those other levels of abstraction that you mentioned are deterministic and predictable . I think that's a massive difference and it justifies why one should be more skeptical towards AI generated code (skeptical doesn't mean "outright dismissing" tbf).

Fun fact that we have burned those bridges years ago. Every time big codebase updates it's main optimizing toolchain (compiler/linker) ... there is nothing deterministic and predictable. There is only what has been re-tested and what has not been.

> there is nothing deterministic

https://reproducible-builds.org/

> nothing [...] and predictable

Even if the build isn't bit-for-bit-reproducible, any reasonable toolchain will, at least, give predictably equivalent results.

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

#296

Post by silver_silver »

aa-jv wrote: post #111
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.

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 have (older, but that generation) colleagues who simply stop working if there’s something wrong with the build process because they don’t understand it and can’t be bothered to learn. To be fair to them, the systems in question are massively over complicated and the project definitions themselves are the result of copy-paste engineering.

Unfortunately they also project their ignorance, so there’s massive pushback from more senior employees when anyone who does understand tries to untangle the mess and make it more robust.

The same thing will happen with these ML tools in the future, mark my words: writing code will come to be seen as “too complex and error prone” and barely working, massively inefficient and fragile generated code bases will be revered and protected with “don’t fix what isn’t broken”

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

#297

Post by CharlieDigital »

hakaneskici wrote: post #272
CharlieDigital wrote: post #260

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent…

Nice example. If I were that person; from my perspective, I could say the EXACT same thing about my frustration with LLM. That's my mental model, I am trying to make my AI peer to build something and it is complaining about not knowing this new-ish library. They just didn't RTFM :)

The thing is, even I hadn't seen the docs before yesterday, but I could intuit through experience working with similar libraries that my ask wasn't that onerous.

The gist of it was to take the JSON representation of an editor and convert it to Markdown. Every popular editor library has an add on or option to export Markdown as well as import Markdown. But on import/export, you then need to almost always write a small transformer for any custom visual elements encoded as text.

Why MD? Because the user is writing a prompt so we need it as MD so it makes sense to transact this data in MD. It just so happens that the library is newish and docs are sparse in some areas. But totally manageable just by looking at the source how to do it.

I can't say for certain where the disconnect is in this whole thing, but to me it felt like "this isn't easy (because the LLM can't do it), so we shouldn't do it this way".

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

#299

Post by consteval »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110
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…

> 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. That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results…

I think it’s both progress and a problem depending on the application. Yes, innovation, but it’s also why people continue to do heroin.

The human brain is easily manipulated, easily hacked.

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

#300

Post by klabb3 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #275
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.

Maybe, but most people used to trust that their coworkers had the ability to quickly learn what needed to be learned to solve a small problem. AI has made people dependent on lose that skill a bit. I've seen myself people confronted with something they need to learn about and come back with something not much more than "AI said this, so here you go"

I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide between ”prompt engineer engineers” and those who understand. That assumes using LLMs will not improve your understanding compared to traditional means which isn’t necessarily true. I dislike LLMs as coders but for learning new topics quickly they are better than obscure literature or googling for deep blog posts.

That said the pure prompt engineers might suffer similar fate as Stack Overflow engineers, for another reason: the limiting factor of building software is not shitting out code or even tests, it’s curbing the accumulated total complexity in the project as it grows. This is incredibly hard even for humans but the best engineers can reduce it. These most difficult problems have at least 2-3 properties that make them almost impossible for LLMs today: they’re non-local, hard to quantify and have enough constraints to mandate solutions that end in the fringes of training data set. Even simple self-contained LLM solutions introduce more complexity than necessary.

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