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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#31

Post by grandempire »

deeviant wrote: post #24

> Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them Conversely: Some people want to insist that writing code 10x slower is the right way to do things, that horses were always better, more dependable than cares, and that nobody would want to step into one of those flying monstrosities. And they may als…

This is the new technology is always better argument that invoked the imagery of all the times I was true and ignores all the products that have been disposed of.

The truth is it depends on every detail. What technology. For who. When.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#32

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #4
jll29 wrote: post #3

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…

What do you think is the big difference between these tools and calculators?

There's a reason we don't let kids use calculators to learn their times tables. In order to be effective at more advanced mathematics, you need to develop a deep intuition for what 9 * 7 means, not just what buttons you need to push to get the calculator to spit out 63.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#33

Post by pdpi »

Cyclone_ wrote: post #23
palmotea wrote: post #8

That's probably the mechanism by which AI will take over many jobs: 1. Skilled people do a good job, AI does a not-so-good job. 2. AI users get dumbed down so they can't do any better. Mediocrity normalized. 3. Replace the AI users with AI.

In this scenario, if AI does a not so good job, there will still be good developers left to code.

Sure, the problem then becomes finding the ideal ratio between good "proper" programmers and AI code monkeys.

Also, it'll be interesting to see how LLM prompt writing develops as a skill unto itself.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#36

Post by jas39 »

Frankly, i don't think this is true at all. If anything I notice, for me, that I take better and more informed decisions, in many aspects of life. Think this criticism comes from a position of someone having invested alot of time in something AI can do quite well.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#38

Post by mahoro »

> There is a concept called “Copilot Lag”. It refers to a state where after each action, an engineer pauses, waiting for something to prompt them what to do next.

I've been experiencing this for 10-15 years. I type something and then wait for IDE to complete function names, class methods etc. From this perspective, LLM won't hurt too much because I'm already dumb enough.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#39

Post by remexre »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #4
jll29 wrote: post #3

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…

What do you think is the big difference between these tools and calculators?

Imagine a calculator that computes definite integrals, but gives non-sensical results on non-smooth functions for whatever reason (i.e., not an error, but an incorrect but otherwise well-formed answer).

If there were a large number of people who didn't quite understand what it meant for a function to be continuous, let alone smooth, who were using such a calculator, I think you'd see similar issues to the ones that are identified with LLM usage: a large number of students wouldn't learn how to compute definite or indefinite integrals, and likely wouldn't have an intuitive understanding of smoothness or continuity either.

I think we don't see these problems with calculators because the "entry-level" ones don't have support for calculus-related functionality, and because people aren't taught how to arrange the problems that you need calculus to solve until after they've given some amount of calculus-related intuition. These conditions obviously aren't the case for LLMs.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#40

Post by jtwaleson »

Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
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