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

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31–40 of 106 posts

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

#31

Did you learn arithmetic in school even though calculator exist?

Many did not. It's important to understand the distinction.

I was in middle and high school when calculators became the standard, but they were still expensive enough that we kept the Ti-80 calculators on a backroom shelf and checked them out when there was an overnight problem set or homework assignment. In a round about way, I think I ended up understanding more about the underlying maths because of this.

So, no, many did not actually learn arithmetic in school. This isn't necessarily because of the calculator, but if you don't get a student to understand what arithmetic even is then handing them a calculator may as well be like handing them a magic wand that "does numbers".

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

#33
post #4

One follow-up question I’ve been thinking about: In the AI era, is it still worth spending significant time reading deep CS books like Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann? Part of my hesitation is that AI tools can generate implementations for many distributed system patterns now. At the same time, I suspect that without understanding the underlying ideas (replication, consistency, partitioning,…

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: About 10 years I moved into leadership roles (VP Eng) and while I continued to write code for POCs, it hasn't been my primary role for quite some time. DDIA has been a book I pull out often when guiding leaders and members of my teams when it comes to building distributed systems. I'm writing more code these days because I can, and I still reference DDIA and have the second edition preordered.

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

#34
There are two aspects to this. The desire to learn and the utility of learning. These are two very different things. Arguably the best programmers I have known have been explorers and hopped around a lot. Their primary skills have been flexibility and curiosity. The point here was their curiosity, not what they were curious about. Curiosity enabled them to attack new problems quickly and find solutions when others couldn't. Very often those solutions had nothing to do with skip lists or bubble sort. Studying algorithms is useful for general problem solving and hey, as a bonus, it helps sometimes when you are solving a real world problem, but staying curious is what really matters.

We have seen so many massive changes to software engineering in the last 30 years that it is hard to argue the clear utility of any specific topic or tool. When I first started it really mattered that you understood bubble sort vs quicksort because you probably had to code it. Now very few people think twice about how sort happens in python or how hashing mechanism are implemented. It does, on occasion, help to know that but not like it used to.

So that brings it back to what I think is a fundamental question: If CS topics are less interesting now, are you shifting that curiosity to something else? If so then I wouldn't worry too much. If not then that is something to be concerned about. So you don't care about red black trees anymore but you are getting into auto-generating Zork like games with an LLM in your free time. You are probably on a good path if that is the case. If not, then find a new curiosity outlet and don't beat yourself up about not studying the limits of a single stack automata.

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

#39
post #7

Because AI still hallucinates. Since you mentioned algorithms, today for fun I decided to ask Claude a pretty difficult algorithm problem. Claude confidently told me a greedy solution is enough, before I told Claude a counterexample that made Claude use dynamic programming instead. If you haven't learned the fundamentals, you are not in a position to judge whether AI is correct or not. And this isn't limited to AI; y…

I'm curious, what was the algorithm problem?

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

#40
post #7

Because AI still hallucinates. Since you mentioned algorithms, today for fun I decided to ask Claude a pretty difficult algorithm problem. Claude confidently told me a greedy solution is enough, before I told Claude a counterexample that made Claude use dynamic programming instead. If you haven't learned the fundamentals, you are not in a position to judge whether AI is correct or not. And this isn't limited to AI; y…

That is correct. But for how long ? How long would it take for AI to learn all of this too ? AI sure does learn faster than humans and even though it will never degrade the relevance of fundamentals, don't you think that the bar for someone beginning to learn about the fundamentals, would just keep increase exponentially.
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