I see things the opposite, LLMs are automating slow, easy, and tedious work so I have more time to spend on actually interesting problems
Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#72I actually find the the inverse is true. I find that thinking more in terms of algorithm trade-offs and strategies for distributed systems, and work with the LLM to explore what the state of the art options are and how to analyze which are appropriate for my current project.
I see over and over those with the deeper understanding are able to drive the AI/LLM code generation processes faster and more effectively, and build things that can be built on by others without hitting hard bottlenecks.
The less people understand CS fundamentals the faster they his a blockade of complexity. This is not necessarily bad code, but sloppy thinking. And CS fundamentals are information and logical processing fundamentals.
It is the Centaur issue. You need to help provide the evaluation and framing for the AI/LLM to search out the possibilities and well known solutions, and code up the prototypes. Without the fundamentals you have to rediscover them slowly after you already hit the hard problems and pause for days or months while trying to work you way around them.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The point is that if you know the algorithm will produce X as the output if the input is Y, give that as a tool to Claude
And if you know that the previous algorithm completes in Z milliseconds, tell Claude that too and give it a tool (a command it can run) to benchmark its implementation.
This way you don't need to tell it what it did wrong, it'll check itself.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#74I specialize in cloud + app dev leading consulting projects. I can absolutely guarantee you that AI does a horrible job of architecture for distributed systems, concurrency implementations, and data engineering and won’t do the optimal design unless you carefully guide it.
CS fundamentals? In this day and age it’s only important to keep up with them if you are one of the relatively few people (even in BigTech and adjacent) who are building the fundamentals or trying to get a job in one where “grinding leetCode” is important.
Before the pearl clutching starts I had to implement many of the algorithms as part of my $DayJob early in my career as a C bit twiddler across various platforms. But haven’t since 2012-2014.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#75There 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 co…
The best software engineers I know, know how to go from ambiguous customer requirements to solutions including solving XYProblems, managing organization and code complexity, dealing with team dynamics etc.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#76My naïve answer to this is, one should never be interested in things because of how useful it might be, but because of the thing itself.
Otherwise, AI won’t be the first to make one losing interest.
With interest, AI may even make it more addicting.
Another distinction to make is, when you use AI, are you taking a shortcut, or channeling it to automate the boring stuffs so that you can explore things you otherwise don’t have time to explore?
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#77There 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 co…
I'd take another view here and suggest you not learn all this untill you need it.
The day you need it, you'll be more motivated to learn it. That's pretty much how I learnt most things.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#78As a non-member of the exalted-many who get to hack for a living-
I agree. The nature of the machine, is to crush the artisanry and joy from the task. However, you can't beat it, so…
I use the miserable things as "research accelerators." I have neither the time, nor the capacity to sustain the BAC necessary, to parse all of the sources and documentation of the various systems in which I'm liable to take interest. I very rarely ask them to "do ${task} for me," but rather: "What is the modern approach to ${task}? And, how do I avoid that and do ${task} in the spirit of Unix?” "Has anyone already done ${task} well?" "Are there any examples of people attempting ${task} and failing spectacularly?"
If you treat it like your boss, it'll act like your boss. If you treat it like your assistant, it'll act like your assistant.
Edit: derp.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#79So far I've only been able to get coding assistants to do things I actually understand (or slightly beyond). Either something I learned long ago, or these days things I learn online .... with the help of the LLM.
Either way, if you want to talk with an LLM on the same level, you're going to need to train on the same dataset.
Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
#80It’s important to know what magick words to say to the demon to get what you want. Knowing the fundamentals is part of that in my view. At some point, the YouTube tutorials for complex CS mechanisms are probably fine. I like doing toy examples of it myself and even having the LLM coach me along.
Knowing the right tool for the job is even more powerful now because it will prevent you from going down a rabbit hole the LLM thinks is just fine.