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

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

#61

Post by theshrike79 »

kccqzy wrote: 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…

Did you give Claude a way to test/verify/benchmark said algorithm compared to other solutions?

If not, how can it not hallucinate when you didn't give it any constraints?

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

#62

Post by theshrike79 »

rossjudson wrote: post #20
royal__ wrote: post #8

These tools actually make me more interested in CS fundamentals. Having strong conceptual understanding is as relevant as ever for making good judgement calls and staying connected with your work.

This is the right answer. AI writing code for you? Then spend that time understanding what it is writing and the fundamentals behind it. Does it work? How does it work? If you can't answer those questions, you should think carefully about what value you bring. We're in this greenfield period where everybody's pet ideas can be brought to life. In other words... Now anyone can make something nobody gives a shit about.

> Now anyone can make something nobody gives a shit about.

As a corollary, I can build shit that's perfect for me and I don't really care if it's any good for anyone else =)

Before I had to find someone else's shit and deal with their shit, trying to make it do the shit I need it to do and nothing else.

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

#63

Post by theshrike79 »

wcfrobert wrote: post #43

To borrow a concept from Simon Willison: you need to "hoard things you know how to do”. You need to know what is possible; you need to be able to articulate what you want. AI is a fast car, but it’s empty and still needs a driver. As long as humans are still in the loop, the quality of the driver matters.

Terminology matters, if you use the right words, the AI will work better.

Just saying "use red/green TDD" is a shortcut to a very specific way of fixing bugs.

Or when you use a multi-modal model to transcribe video saying "timecode" instead of "timestamp" will improve the results (AV production people say timecode, programmers say timestamp, it hits different parts of the training material)

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

#64

Post by xigoi »

entrox wrote: post #51

It used to be that you had to have a strong understanding of the underlying machine in order to create software that actually worked. Things like cycle times of instructions, pipeline behavior, registers and so on. You had to, because compilers weren‘t good enough. Then they caught up. You used to manage every byte of memory, utilized every piece of underlying machinery like the different chips, DMA transfers and so…

Natural language is not a higher abstraction than code, it’s just more ambiguous.

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

#66

Post by rerdavies »

theshrike79 wrote: post #61
kccqzy wrote: 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…

Did you give Claude a way to test/verify/benchmark said algorithm compared to other solutions? If not, how can it not hallucinate when you didn't give it any constraints?

You can just tell it that it's doing it wrong (and why). Of course, you have to know that it did it wrong.

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

#68

Post by rerdavies »

xigoi wrote: post #64
entrox wrote: post #51

It used to be that you had to have a strong understanding of the underlying machine in order to create software that actually worked. Things like cycle times of instructions, pipeline behavior, registers and so on. You had to, because compilers weren‘t good enough. Then they caught up. You used to manage every byte of memory, utilized every piece of underlying machinery like the different chips, DMA transfers and so…

Natural language is not a higher abstraction than code, it’s just more ambiguous.

But you can describe more abstract things with natural language than you can with code.

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

#70

Post by rerdavies »

ankurdhama wrote: post #15

Did you learn arithmetic in school even though calculator exist?

Interestingly, here in Canada, kids are no longer taught long division. When I was in highschool, we were taught to use slide rules, but not very seriously. And I would imagine, nobody gets taught how to use trigonometry tables anymore (at least I hope so). So, these days, you learn arithmetic very differently because calculators exist.
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