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Yes, you should still learn to code
- 000ooo000 4y agoProbably worth a disclaimer, somewhere: "I'm the author of Python Crash Course, which is published by No Starch Press: https://nostarch.com/pythoncrashcourse2e https://nostarch.com/pythoncrashcourse2e" - author and OP
- pcthrowaway 4y agoI actually thought this might have been written by ChatGPT. Part of the answer is that "you should learn to code beyond basic syntax, so that you can be better than the computer". What it doesn't mention is that the state of AI is also going to continue improving, so you're possibly entering an arms race.
- ge96 4y agoIt could be sad if one day AI can do anything. One of those cliche "what's the point". No joy anymore in building.
- topper-123 4y agoI play chess and like it, even though the computer in my pocket can win every human player.
- jcijcijc 4y agoIf you said "hey I'm bored let's add more squares. Let's move some pieces around or maybe change their movement rules" or "let's play checkers instead" then a human could adapt to this situation pretty easily. A reinforcement learning model like AlphaZero would be like "Whoa whoa whoa not so fast. Let's fire up the GPU cluster." Maybe one day we won't need GPU clusters. But ultimately we're the ones who create all of these tools and decide how to use them.
- candiodari 4y agoWhy do you treat humans so very different from AlphaZero here? Alphazero could badly play other games quickly, just like humans can. AlphaZero is just able to improve beyond what any human can ever achieve for a lot of types of games.
- speedgoose 4y agoYou don’t always need to have a point for your artistic activities or your hobbies. For example , people still use oil paint while photography exists, people learn piano when a computer does it better. But professionally, we may have to find new activities.
- ekianjo 4y ago> people still use oil paint while photography exists It's not at all the same medium. Unless you consider that the whole point of oil painting is to imitate realistic pictures...
- pcthrowaway 4y agoOK, people attempt photorealistic art when of course, the best they can hope for is to look as realistic as a photograph would. As someone else mentioned, people play chess for fun. People do things that they will never be as good at as computers. I don't buy this idea that people need to be the "best" at something to enjoy it. Living that way dooms you to always being unhappy
- nicbou 4y agoPeople could retreat to the physical world where AI is useless. That being said, people still do things they're outclassed at. We still have blacksmiths.
- flangola7 4y agoTransformer models work on data. Text, images, and motor control can all be fed into the pit.
- ChatGTP 4y agoI honestly think a lot of people in their twenties already do this. They’re not making much money but seem to be making enough to just have fun and pursue other things. My brother has figured he can make a great living out of gardening for people. Yes robots will probably do this one day, but will they to the same level ? Really who knows anymore? I’m actually sure a lot of the more wealthy people he works for kind of also just like him and his company too. He’s a youthful fun guy with a lot of creative ideas. The silicone value push for eternal life via the singularity and trips to Mars seems to be mostly fuelled by cults and the need to keep shareholder happy / profits coming in. I don’t know if anyone else cares that much, including the bots themselves. Time will tell.
- japhyr 4y agoI'm the author of the post. I didn't feel any need to add a disclaimer, because if my book faded to insignificance tomorrow I'd still argue the same points. It's really clear how useful these tools are to many experienced programmers, but I have no idea what impact they'll have on people who are new to programming. Most of the write-ups I've seen so far have been from people who already know how to code. I think it will be some time yet before we really see how effectively people who know nothing about programming are able to use these tools for learning.
- HervalFreire 4y ago> I'm the author of the post. I didn't feel any need to add a disclaimer, because if my book faded to insignificance tomorrow I'd still argue the same points. You need the disclaimer. The reason why is because no one can read your intentions, they can only guess your intention from your actions. By waiting until a 3rd party disclosed this information a little bit of trust was automatically lost.
- KyeRussell 4y agoThis is not how a conflict of interest works.
- travisjungroth 4y ago> I didn't feel any need to add a disclaimer, because if my book faded to insignificance tomorrow I'd still argue the same points. I believe you, but this really isn't how maintaining credibility with a conflict of interest works. You also don't have to add a "disclaimer". Just mention anywhere that you wrote a book on programming. You can say it abstractly like that if you don't want it to be an ad. Considering how much this experience informs your argument, it should be pretty easy to work in. And thank you for your book. I've recommended it to many people.
- japhyr 4y agoI was really surprised by people's reactions about the need for a disclaimer, and didn't know what to make of it for a while. I also watched the votes on my comment here go up and down quickly, indicating that some people thought a disclaimer was warranted, and some thought there was no need. I ended up doing a lot of reflecting about the comments people made. I think I've gotten used to writing for an audience that already knows that I'm the author of PCC, and I start to assume that anyone else will see that quickly as well. Do I really need to add a disclaimer any time I write about the process of learning to code, or its ongoing relevance? I'm not asking anyone to respond to that, especially on an old post, but that's the question that I kept coming back to for a while. I realize that a post like this, shared with a larger audience, at this point in time, warrants a disclaimer. I've been a member of HN for over ten years, and I value my reputation here. I'm sorry if I misled anyone as they went into reading this post. I didn't add a disclaimer right away because I've made a habit of not responding too quickly to feedback on the internet when I'm not sure exactly how to respond. I ended up adding a disclaimer, but that was well after this had dropped off the front page. I didn't put off adding a disclaimer to mislead anyone, it just took a while to think through all this. I will be more careful about which posts need to include a disclaimer from this point forward. I know few people will see this, but if anyone sees the surrounding comments after the disclaimer is there I'd like them to see this context. Thank you all for the critical feedback. As uncomfortable as it is sometimes, it's part of what I've always appreciated about HN.
- marchenko 4y agoThe Substack is called “mostly Python”. I assumed the author is a programming educator or enthusiast of some sort.
- postsantum 4y agoI wish HN had pinned comments to save others time
- ojbyrne 4y agoI found myself thinking that yes, you should still learn to code, but no you probably shouldn’t bother to write blog posts about why you should still learn to code.
- politician 4y agoThat’s right, use ChatGPT to write the blog posts.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoHonesty I think tools like GPT are going to cause more people to learn to code, not less. I've been using GPT to write very simple utilities in languages I am unfamiliar with, and for me, there's no faster way to pick up a language then to see an example program where you already know exactly what it does. (Or is supposed to do, finding the small mistakes that GPT sometimes makes also helps learn things, ironically.)
- shaunkoh 4y agoYes exactly. I had a specific project in mind, and ChatGPT was able to give me step by step instructions how to build it. It’s like having a private tutor. That’s transformative for folks like me that struggle to get through generic 12 week courses, but want their learning experience scaffolded around a project they’re already motivated to work on.
- croes 4y agoDo people learn more languages since translation tools exist?
- saurik 4y agoI don't think that analogy works as it isn't about learning languages so much as knowing how to write (but I also can't quite fix the analogy, sadly). A better one (but one which doesn't leave software engineering): as programming languages have gotten easier to use and tooling has gotten better making programmers more effective, more programmers have been needed to write ever more code despite them all having to expend much less effort if they were to merely do the same things... because, and this is key, the tooling now allowance people to tackle ever more complicated problems leading to new things that can be achieved.
- croes 4y agoI think it fits because ChatGPT writes code for you like DeepL and Google Translate translates for you. Easier tooling is more like programms like Duolingo and Babbel. If you totally trust the former you don't need to learn anything, the latter enforces to do something on your own.
- gnicholas 4y agoIt's true that it would be helpful to be able to troubleshoot the code output of AI chatbots. What I've heard from friends is that ChatGPT is pretty good at troubleshooting itself — not automatically, but if you re-enter buggy output, it can often correctly suggest how to fix the bug. This won't always be the case, but it does seem to undercut the argument that humans are always needed to fix bigs. There may be other reasons, like optimization, that are more compelling. Or it's possible that AI will be good at that as well!
- croes 4y agoIf ChatGPT had existed 20 years ago, things like React would never have been developed and all websites would still be using nested tables for layout.
- gnicholas 4y ago...or ChatGPT would have come up with something like/better than React, and we/it would be using that now.
- medellin 4y agoHas AI produced any novel technology yet that it wasn’t trained to do?
- LesZedCB 4y agoI feel like the fact this question is being asked in plain seriousness 4 months after the technology was made publicly available/known to the general public sends a different message than you meant.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- californical 4y agoPretty sure they were asking rhetorically, because the answer is obviously not, since that’s not how LLMs work
- medellin 4y agoYes. Although over text it sometimes doesn’t come through.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- recuter 4y agoLishten, money penny, just because we have face swapping technology and voice cloning technology and deep fakes does not mean I shouldn't practice my Sean Connery impression. I admit, I may be somewhat shaken by these recent developments but I'm not shttiered.
- _8j50 4y agoMy view is that even if AI can program really well, it can't architect full solutions, you still need to tell it specifics and test/debug its output (at least for now). It's like if you're a farmer and you got tractors, you don't need to till and harvest anymore but you still gotta drive it and press buttons and even if tractors drove themselves and pressed their own buttons you gotta supervise them and maintain them. I think people being less eager to be programmers will only help with increasing wages lol
- famahar 4y agoA single crop harvester can replace 30 farm workers. If programming is going the same route as your farming example then we're in for a shock. The complexity and scale of software increases every year so I wonder if AI will be able to keep up or if there will always be a need for specialized roles.
- realusername 4y agoCoding is a small percentage of a programming job, I don't write more than 100 lines / day, GPT tools are also very late to the party of code generation, it's been 40 years of development in this area.
- _8j50 4y agoYeah but not everyone affords a crop harvester and even then you have less farm workers not no farm workers. I think there will be less demand for programmers and more demand at lesser pay for the top quintile of talented coders. There will also be ML managing/engineering/monitoring type jobs that will require you to know how to code. Various other disciplines will also have knowing python and shell scripting a requirement. The only thing that will get decimated is the need for a 10:1 ratio (making that up for the record) between coders that stitch software and suck at debugging and coders that sre debugging ninjas that can identify issues GPT* hallucinates. The next stage of decimation is a long way off when GPT is able to be integrated into the production monitoring tooling, debug on it's own and answer questions like "why is your code slow under these circumstances? And why does it randomly crash?" Right now operations/sre/users ask that of the programmer. I don't believe GPT is anywhere near being able to reliably answer those questions because if it were, why emit such code to begin with? You would be able to prompt it to generate perfect code if it could do that, the code I have seen is impressive but full of flaws even a collegr freshman wouldn't make. To me the question is the same as dalle-e replacing artists. Even whe the drawing is not weird or just messed up it still does not "wow" you, i mean technically it qualifies and for a machine it is impressive but it just feels mediocre to the most part. I think in reality what you will see is GPT assisted IDEs giving new meaning to "code completion".
- _8j50 4y agoMy view is that even if AI can program really well, it can't architect full solutions, you still need to tell it specifics and test/debug its output (at least for now). It's like if you're a farmer and you got tractors, you don't need to till and harvest anymore but you still gotta drive it and press buttons and even if tractors drove themselves and pressed their own buttons you gotta supervise them and maintain them. I think people being less eager to be programmers will only help with increasing wages lol But does this mean no more stackoverflow? Not cool.
- broast 4y agoLearn to read code that you didn't write
- HervalFreire 4y agoThis post is speculative. We're only 4 months into seeing the potential of LLMs with huge sets of training data. 4 months... that's it. Wait 5 years, and during that time we'll know whether or not it's worth it to know programming. Maybe not even 5 years, give it 2 years.
- SanderNL 4y agoGPT3 is from 2020. I know ChatGPT is slightly novel, but let’s not exaggerate.
- HervalFreire 4y agoI'm talking about the recent acceleration of changes, chatGPT, dall e, midjourney. chatGPT and dall-e put fuel on the fire. Interest has spiked and additionally the industry and academia is matching the trend with an equivalent refocus of research efforts. No exaggeration here to say "we don't know what will happen"
- SanderNL 4y agoDall-E was a few months later. I don’t want to be obtuse, but I am into this topic for quite a while and progress is actually kind of slow to me. Society is still hung up on (to me) minor and extremely uninteresting issues. I’m getting tired of the “losing jobs” narrative. GPT4 is a worse coder than 3. What I’d like to see is some discussion about this tech disrupting the need for “leadership” and bullshit executives. IMO vast swaths of elites - GPTs tendency to hallucinate makes it the perfect politician - are becoming obsolete as their opinion and influence is no longer interesting / necessary. This, of course, will not happen. We will only replace workers, the rest will be fine. We won’t even talk about it. Sorry for the detour and unsubstantiated rant. I deserve the downvotes. Taking the hit for the socialist team here.
- jcijcijc 4y agoMaybe we're 2 months away from the singularity or 200 years. Who knows? Until then you should be paralyzed with fear. Don't get comfortable!
- textread 4y agoNo, you need not. Especially if you own a time machine. Its a matter of perspective, though. Analogy:- Because of a tool such as Grammarly, I no longer recommend my kids to bother when they lose marks due to minor grammatical mistakes on a handwritten test. They better put that 80-20 to practice and learn to recognize aggressively reducing their efforts/tasks/work to 20 wherever possible. Their English teacher disagrees with me. Maybe, we do have a horse in this race. This comment was edited in Grammarly, and it score a 67 out of 100 on readability.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quonn 4y agoDid you/Grammarly mean „scored“?
- RadiozRadioz 4y agoSo you're the reason why the texts I receive from younger relatives are incomprehensible. You should listen to their English teacher. An adult using Grammarly to highlight their mistakes is different from a child relying on Grammarly because they haven't learned any better. > This comment was edited in Grammarly, and it score a 67 out of 100 on readability. I can see that. Your 80-20 sentence is poorly constructed, you used the wrong tense in "and it score a 67 out of 100". Other than highlighting the fact that Grammarly thinks you write poorly, what point are you making exactly?
- gumballindie 4y agoThe elephant in the room is that a lot of outsourcing jobs will get slashed first. Curious how this will affect the economy of countries such as india or other popular outsourcing destinations.
- drvdevd 4y agoAs someone who is both a developer and currently occasionally uses GPT in the course of development, I skimmed this article looking for the one point I think there is to make on this subject. I think the opposite of what people are worrying about will happen here. AI will create a feedback loop for developers, where there just aren’t enough humans to keep up with the work - exacerbating the existing problem of a shortage. For me, LLMs can essentially replace large portions of my workflow: stack overflow, googling for examples, finding some obscure syntax, getting started on a problem when I’m coming from a place of little understanding. Assuming I ask the right questions in the right order and get the output running, it can drastically reduce my time to a working solution. This is the same thing previous tools have done, but with a faster and tighter feedback loop. That will just amplify the primary pattern of software: with every solution we create new problems to solve. And every new abstraction has some hidden cost. Mark my words: our near future problem as engineers is not that we can’t get jobs, it’s that we can’t fill them all. We will most likely find ourselves desperately chasing automation that never quite gets as automated as we need it to be. Of course this is both good and bad. But it means that like this author, we need to encourage everyone possible to “learn to code” in some sense.
- tobr 4y agoOn the other hand, if it replaces large parts of your workflow, that means your work is now very different. It will perhaps be more about making strategic decisions, less about implementing the details. So depending on what type of work you are good at and enjoy, it can be a good or a bad thing.
- ChatGTP 4y agoDon’t forget that most companies want us to actually do more, there’s pretty much infinite creativity available. Faster and cheaper code delivery will probably lead to more code , more moonshot ideas to be involved in, more scaling issues, security issues and on and on. There will now be more competition of course, more LLMs to build and maintain. More features to keep up with etc. Also AI safety jobs will become more of a thing, could just be getting started. …or it’s the end of all work!!!!!!
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- kebsup 4y agoIncreased productivity of a single developer -> less demand for developers More AI based companies and products -> more demand for developers Not sure which force is stronger.
- TradingPlaces 4y agoThe correct answer is “switch your major to electrical engineering or industrial engineering."
- nateb2022 4y agoIn my opinion, GPT doesn't invalidate the need to learn to code anymore than the invention of the pocket calculator invalidated the need to learn one's arithmetic.