521–530 of 554 posts
Is learning to code with AI coding agents going to make you a better programmer than one who learns to code without such tools?
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Sorry but what the heck is up with all the ellipses in this comment?
They're trying really hard to make sure you know they didn't write their post with an LLM? /s
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Isn't the struggle of sifting through a labyrinth of physical books and learning how and where to find the right answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short-circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse books is actually harmful long term...
It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs. A library has related books sitting in close proximity to one another. I don't know how many times I've gone to a library looking for one thing but ended up finding something much more interesting. Or to just go to the library with no end goal in mind...
Books often have the "scam trap" where highly-regarded/praised books are often only useful if you are already familiar with the topic.
For example: i fell for the scam of buying "Advanced Programming in the unix environment" and a lot of concept are only shown but not explained. Wasted money, really. It's one of those book i regret not pirating before buying, really.
At the end of the day, watching some youtube video and then referencing the OS-specific manpage is worth much more than reading that book.
I suspect the case to be the same for other "highly-praised" books as well.
The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense. What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the r…
Isn't that also the explicit aim of AI replacement, as stupid as it sounds? To me, the idea appear to be separation of money and work, so that economy will be strictly the concern of a metaphorical upper floor, floating in the thin air.
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> Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced This really isn't the case from what I've seen. It's that they use Cursor or other code generation tools integrated into their development environment to generate code, and if it's functional and looks from a fuzzy distance like 'good' code (in the 'code in the small' sense), they send an over…
That's bad and those juniors should be taught to do better or be "managed out of the company". Their job is to deliver code that they have proved to work. This inspired me to write a longer form version of this: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-we-have-proven-to...
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This should be possible online, it would be if more journals were open access.
Disagree, actually. Having spent a lot of time publishing papers in those very journals, I can tell you that just browsing a journal is much less conducive to discovering a new area to dive into than going to a library and reading a book. IME, books tend to synthesize and collect important results and present them in an understandable (pedagogical?!) way that most journals do not, especially considering that many pap…
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That's bad and those juniors should be taught to do better or be "managed out of the company". Their job is to deliver code that they have proved to work. This inspired me to write a longer form version of this: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-we-have-proven-to...
The link is a 404 for me
It's now being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313297
Btw, it's funny that certain kind of people tend to believe in common sense only when it comes from the mouth of the AWS CEO or a similar persona, and one can be ridiculed when saying the same thing as an anynomous commenter.
It's always been this way with any hype cycle. This one is just the latest iteration.
Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a…
ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!