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747s and coding agents

carlkolon.com

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Re: 747s and coding agents

#31

Post by andoando »

cedws wrote: post #24

We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything? My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to…

Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted.

Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it?

Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what was happening in this exact scenario before and after.

I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I care about how authentication works as a principal, what methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3 hours trying to debug the nuances of configuring the Spring security library for a small project I dont care about?

Re: 747s and coding agents

#32

Post by snackerblues »

tass wrote: post #5
omoikane wrote: post #4

> reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less Maybe he meant "reviewing code from coding agents"? Reviewing code from other humans is often a great way to learn.

I interpreted this as not as good a way to learn. I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading someone’s code doesn’t teach me all the wrong ways they attempted before it looked like the way it now does.

Exactly. And vice versa, one of the biggest benefits of code review is calling out pitfalls you, the reviewer have ran into that the reviewee isn't aware of. LLM addicts won't have any experience with what works/doesn't work, so their reviewing will be pretty useless

Re: 747s and coding agents

#33

Post by archmaster »

I've seen a lot of posts like this one, but this is the first to encapsulate how I feel so well.

Honestly, I don't really know what to do. I spent my whole life (so far; I'm still very young) falling in love with programming, and now I just don't find this agent thing fun at all. But I just don't know how to find my niche if using LLMs truly does end up being the only way for me to build valuable things with my only skills.

It's pretty depressing and very scary. But I appreciate this article for at least conveying that so effectively...

Re: 747s and coding agents

#34

Post by shich »

The pilot analogy hits different when you consider that pilots still train on simulators for exactly this reason — they're legally required to maintain proficiency even when autopilot handles 99% of flights.

There's no equivalent mandate for software engineers. Nothing stops you from spending years as a pure "prompt pilot" and losing the ability to read a stack trace or reason about algorithmic complexity. The atrophy is silent and gradual.

The author's suggestion to write code by hand as an educational exercise is right but will be ignored by most, because the feedback loop for skill atrophy is so delayed. You won't notice you've lost the skill until you're debugging something the agent made a mess of, under pressure, with no fallback.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#35

Post by MrJohz »

borzi wrote: post #16

> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things. How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step…

Firstly, if you're doing those steps, you're building your own tutorial, not just following the exact steps in a manual provided with the software. The sample config won't be exact or perfect for your setup, so you'll need to say least figure out how to adjust it to your needs.

That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-style software. The first time I learned how to program, I learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands, even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the code I'd been told to write.

From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required following very simple instructions.

The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools, but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was basically useless outside of that.

The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is still practical.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#36

Post by demorro »

andoando wrote: post #31
cedws wrote: post #24

We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything? My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to…

Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted. Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it? Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to yo…

> Does this mean you'd be incapable of learning anything?

Yes. This strikes me as obvious. People don't have the sort of impulse control you're implying by default, it has to be learnt just like anything else. This sort of environment would make you an idiot if it's all you've ever known.

You might as well be saying that you can just explain to children why they should eat their vegetables and rely on them to be rational actors.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#37

Post by mgfist »

SoftTalker wrote: post #29
cortesoft wrote: post #17

I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to remember, but I first learned to program before I had the internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton, because I would have to read a lot of books…

I use AI for very little but I do like using it for stuff I'm just not very interested in but have to get done. For programming, I don't like it. It's like a master carpenter building furniture from IKEA. Sure it's faster and he doesn't have to think very hard and the end result is acceptable but he feels lazy and after a while he feels like he is losing his skills. The best days of computing for me were what you rem…

All fair, but I think a different interpretation could be that AI allows you to vastly expand the scope of the possible, such to create a situation again where things are challenging and frustrating and fun.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#38

Post by cedws »

andoando wrote: post #31
cedws wrote: post #24

We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything? My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to…

Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted. Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it? Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to yo…

It may very well have stunted my learning. What’s the point of absorbing information when you have a consortium of experts available 24/7?

Saying what you said about it being down to being how you use LLM comes from a privileged position. You likely already know how to code. You likely know how to troubleshoot. Would you develop those same skillsets today starting from zero?

Re: 747s and coding agents

#39

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

cedws wrote: post #24

We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything? My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to…

As an older person, I'm not worried. The world changes all the time. People are put people in difficult situations, and they have to adapt. "Oh no, how will people learn things?" is not that big of a struggle in the grand scheme. We're not burning books or giving people lobotomies. People can still learn if they want to, easier than ever before. Businesses will adapt, people will adapt, by necessity. Things will be very different, sure. But then we get used to the difference, and it becomes normal.

Kids today couldn't imagine how people used to live just 100 years ago, like it was the dark ages. People from that age would probably look at kids 10 years ago and think, these poor children! They don't know how to work hard! They don't know anything about life! They're glued to these bizarre light machines! Every age is different.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#40

Post by PunchyHamster »

LatencyKills wrote: post #25
cortesoft wrote: post #17

I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to remember, but I first learned to program before I had the internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton, because I would have to read a lot of books…

I've always felt a little odd saying, "Back in my day we had to understand the cpu, registers, etc." It's a true statement, but doesn't help in any way. Is that stuff still worth knowing, IMHO? Yes. Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today? Absolutely.

> Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today?

You could do that without that knowledge back in the day too, we had languages that were higher level than assembler for forever.

It's just that the range of knowledge needed to maximize machine usage is far smaller now. Before you had to know how to write a ton of optimizations, nowadays you have to know how to write your code so the compiler have easy job optimizing it.

Before you had to manage the memory accesses, nowadays making sure you're not jumping actross memory too much and being aware how cache works is enough

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