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747s and coding agents

carlkolon.com

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Re: 747s and coding agents

#41

Post by PunchyHamster »

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 dont use it a lot but when I do it's pretty much 2 patterns

* "search on steroids" - get me to the thing I need or ask whether the thing I need exists, give me few examples and I can get it running.

* getting the trivial and uninteresting parts out of the way, like writing some helper function for stuff I'm doing now, I'll just call AI, let it do its thing and continue writing the code in meantime, look back ,check if it makes sense and use it.

So I'm not really cheating myself out of the learning process, just outsource the parts I know well enough that I can check for correctness but save time writing

Re: 747s and coding agents

#42

Post by andoando »

cedws wrote: post #38
andoando wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Supposedly because AI has limits and you still have to know what you're doing so you can guide it and do it better.

If that's not true, then what's the problem with not learning the material? Go do something more productive with your time if the personal curiosity isn't good enough. Were in a whole new world.

>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?

This is true, and I can't answer that 100% confidently. I imagine I would just be doing more more/complicated things and learning higher level concepts. For example, if right off the bat I could produce a web app, Id want to deploy it somewhere. So Id come across things like ssh, nginx, port forwarding, jars, bundles, DNS, authentication, etc. Do this a 1000 times just the way I wrote 1000 different little functions or programs by hand and you'll no shit absorb little here and there as issues come up. Or maybe if whats hard a year ago is easy today, Id want to do something far more incredibly complex than anything anyone's been able to imagine before, and learn in that struggle.

Programmers in the 90s were far more apt at understanding CPU registers, memory and all sorts of low level stuff. Then the abstraction moved up the stack, and then again and again. I think same thing will happen.

Also, you can't say Im in a privileged position for already knowing how to code and at the same time asking what's the point of learning it yourself.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#43

Post by andoando »

demorro wrote: post #36
andoando wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rati…

I see it as being more personality/interest than impulse control. A curious/interested person would try and get involved and be a part of it, someone uninterested will just say what's the point and get by having the work done for them.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#44

Post by cortesoft »

georgemcbay wrote: post #30
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 learned to program on a Commodore 64 using books I could get from libraries and some magazines like Compute!'s Gazette. I got online very early via BBSes (originally on a 300 baud modem for my C64) and was on the internet by the mid to late 1980s. I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it…

> I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just faster.

I think this depends on how you are using the internet. Looking up an API or official documentation is one thing, but asking for direct help on a specific problem via Stackoverflow seems different.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#45

Post by _zagj »

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…

Even people with the Internet growing up still learned largely through books, probably until StackOverflow really took off. One "hack" prior to SO that sometimes goes under-acknowledged was Google Groups. Around 2000, they bought and made free to the public the entire Deja News USENET archive, and suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually find someone who'd asked (and someone who answered) whatever question you had. And the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely high, given the barriers to entry (technical and financial) to being active on USENET's technical groups in the 90s.

Of course, asking a question was another matter, likely to result in a rebuke for violating the group's arcane decorum. But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up against something that genuinely wasn't covered in some FAQ or manpage.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#46

Post by TacticalCoder »

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 had to read books

Same here. Except that as native french speaker there simply weren't that many quality books about programming/computers that I could easily find in french.

So at 11 years old I also learned english, by myself, by using computers (which were in english back then) and by reading computer books.

And we'd exchange tips with other kids in the neighborhood who also had computers and were also learning to code (like my neighbors who eventually, 20 years later, created a software startup in SoCal).

Re: 747s and coding agents

#47

Post by getnormality »

I think this author could consider thinking of the AI as more than just a task rabbit that allows us to not code, not think, not understand.

If the LLM is indeed such a master at complex coding tasks that we don't understand, why not ask it some questions about how the code works?

You can even ask directly about the concern. "I am worried that by letting you do everything I am not learning how the system works. Could you tell me more about what you did and how I might think through it if I needed to do it myself?"

Re: 747s and coding agents

#49

Post by georgemcbay »

cortesoft wrote: post #44
georgemcbay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned to program on a Commodore 64 using books I could get from libraries and some magazines like Compute!'s Gazette. I got online very early via BBSes (originally on a 300 baud modem for my C64) and was on the internet by the mid to late 1980s. I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it…

> I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just faster. I think this depends on how you are using the internet. Looking up an API or official documentation is one thing, but asking for direct help on a specific problem via Stackoverflow seems different.

Fair point, Stackoverflow didn't exist for quite a while after I started using the internet for information, and while I made as much use of it as anyone for googling answers to questions such as "What does this specific 32-bit HRESULT error code from the Win32 API mean in this context", I'm not sure if I ever posted a single question on the site.

Re: 747s and coding agents

#50

Post by dh2022 »

Re: "reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less" - I feel this so much when reviewing the code one of my coworkers writes. My coworker makes plenty of mistakes and I learned the hard way that reviewing his PRs in a web page is not enough. These days when I have to review his code I download his branch locally and load the entire solution in the IDE. I then track his changes and usually find a few things wrong.

BTW - my coworker is not AI. It is a flesh-and-bones SWE.

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