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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

#91

Post by tracker1 »

Ai emphatically doesn't know when to reach for A vs B in terms of the options on the table. At least understanding some of the characteristic trade offs will go a long way. Especially if you are inclined to favor simplicity over unnecessary complexity. AI can easily over-complicate things and make solutions that become a crazy, complex mess.

The vast majority of line of business apps can be solved with a relatively simple CRUD UI with a simple API server with a SQL based RDBMS. But even then, you will hit limits and experience bottlenecks in practice. If you need to do any kind of scaling, you need to know where the low hanging fruit and complexities lay.

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

#92

Post by hirvi74 »

> AI can generate solutions quickly, which makes the effort of learning the fundamentals feel less urgent.

Less urgent, sure. But I would argue it makes learning the fundamentals more necessary than ever. I am a firm believer in there being no such thing as a waste of knowledge. You never know when you might need something.

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

#93

Post by andrei_says_ »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #75
jmward01 wrote: post #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 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.

Important to remember that these skills evolve iteratively and often best in an apprenticeship environment. No one started with these abilities. They get developed by solving problems and getting better at it.

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

#95

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #93
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Important to remember that these skills evolve iteratively and often best in an apprenticeship environment. No one started with these abilities. They get developed by solving problems and getting better at it.

And how many companies do you know of today offer any kind of “apprenticeship environment”? Out of those how many pay former juniors market rate when they become mid level and senior developers and don’t suffer from salary compression and inversion where they pay new employees market rate and existing employees some HR mandated maximum where it makes more sense to job hop?

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

#97

Post by rerdavies »

theshrike79 wrote: post #73
rerdavies wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The prompt would be , "Use a std::unordered_map" to make this code run faster." Review the code. Done.
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