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I do not wholly agree with you. Just to pick on one thing in your reply... > Kids these days don’t know basic assembly It is a problem. Knowing assembly is cr

I do not wholly agree with you. Just to pick on one thing in your reply... > Kids these days don’t know basic assembly It is a problem. Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware. Someone has to write kernels and drivers. The efficiencies happening on the lower level of the stack make the upper layers of the stack faster, more stable. It is also important that we have a large pool of devs who know how to do it. Otherwise that knowledge will be taken in-house and shared under strict NDAs preventing devs working for competition and effectively killing all the efforts of the Open Source community to wrangle free access the computer out of the claws of corporations. This is not a problem that AI has brought about first, but co-pilots are accelerating it. Just to provide some context, I could not wait for 16-bit, 32-bit, and then 64-bit architectures to become popular. I was the happiest dev around when object oriented programming tools became available, same to Linux, web, all frameworks and even cloud computing. But AI as it is currently being sold is a shit tool. If it stays and doesn't disappear after the VC money runs out, we will have to adapt our ways of working and educational courses to teach devs to review work of others recompiled by AI (it can't write shit on its own). Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case?

fma 2y ago
Agree here. As a 90's kid I dove into computers, Internet and programming head first. I went into the field out of passion, not money. I received an engineering degree. If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software. IMHO we will see a brain drain in computer/electronics engineering in 20 years when the pipeline of graduates dwindle and those with experience retire. Hope LLMs can innovate enough to make up, I guess.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  > If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software. That sure sounds like it has nothing to do with LLMs and everything to do with factors not all related to even computer science. “Capitalism” or maybe the more trendy “late-stage capitalism” is probably more to blame here than anything else. Also I reject the idea that there are no kids today that get involved in tech/computers for the joy of learning/exploration. I bristle whenever I see arguments about “kids these days didn’t learn exactly how I did so it must be wrong”. It reeks of “old man yells at cloud” (note, I was also a 90’s kid). It’s the same BS I heard as a kid about how computers would rot your brain or they were horrible for <insert stupid prediction that didn’t come true>.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I agree that it reeks of old men yelling at clouds but there is data driven precedent here: with the advent of smartphones, computer literacy in education has dropped like a rock. It isn’t just kids these days, it’s a genuine shift in computing across the entire populace that happens to really effect the funnel for programmers at the entrance to that funnel. Copilots are an extension of that development, not necessarily something wholly new. I’ve heard this anecdotally from every educator I know at the high school and college level. CS students are increasingly entering without any computer proficiency whatsoever so it has to be built up from scratch.
    - weweweoo 2y ago
      Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work. PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Of course you’ve now effectively circled back to the early 1980s at some level when there was not a lot of expectation that college freshmen had touched a computer much less were proficient even if the wanted major in CS/EE.
joshstrange 2y ago
> Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case? LLMs will not replace us, they just take some of the tedium out of writing code. Yes, they will have to be trained on new frameworks and languages but I don’t see that as a problem. People have to wait for SO questions and blog posts to be written about new frameworks and languages as it stands today. I’m not sure I agree with your arguments about needing a lot of devs to understand assembly or the like. Or rather I disagree with your prediction of where that leads. We are effectively already there and it hasn’t led to your future. We have an amazing open source ecosystem and that billions of people rely on daily without knowing how every part of it works. Open source has only grown during that time. I’ve never done the math myself for calculating the distance between 2 points on a globe. I just grab the Haversine formula and keep going. I don’t see that as a problem. Similarly I’ll reach for an open source library to solve a boring problem instead of doing it myself. I quite literally see no difference in that and using an LLM.
newswasboring 2y ago
> Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware this is a goal for maybe 2% of the industry. And those folks know their assembler or they don't get hired. I think we are producing skills in the proportion of its requirement in the industry.
- jayd16 2y ago
  Just ask the AI to write your assembly too ;)
jrm4 2y ago
Yeah, solving this problem has just about jack to do with "what is being taught." This is beyond the classroom; this is bad incentives in the market/industry.
mycall 2y ago
> it can't write shit on its own It sure can when you use multiple agents having discussions and optimizing characteristics with each other. CrewAI and AutoGen come to mind.
throwthrowuknow 2y ago
I hate to dash your hopes of never seeing LLMs write code again but Llama3 70B is not terrible as a copilot and it’s small enough to run on comparatively cheap hardware or even consumer hardware when quantized plus it’s publicly available so from now on there will always be some form of copilot service or tool that will be in use, that ship has sailed. The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ve maxed out the capabilities of GPTs yet so as more are trained and compute becomes cheaper and as we produce and accumulate more data they should keep getting better for a while at least.
treflop 2y ago
I agree with you but realistically most people are not ever going to learn that much about their job. The people who really know the inner workings of things are compensated accordingly and there will always be these kind of people.

fma 2y ago

Agree here. As a 90's kid I dove into computers, Internet and programming head first. I went into the field out of passion, not money. I received an engineering degree. If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software. IMHO we will see a brain drain in computer/electronics engineering in 20 years when the pipeline of graduates dwindle and those with experience retire. Hope LLMs can innovate enough to make up, I guess.

joshstrange 2y ago
> If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software. That sure sounds like it has nothing to do with LLMs and everything to do with factors not all related to even computer science. “Capitalism” or maybe the more trendy “late-stage capitalism” is probably more to blame here than anything else. Also I reject the idea that there are no kids today that get involved in tech/computers for the joy of learning/exploration. I bristle whenever I see arguments about “kids these days didn’t learn exactly how I did so it must be wrong”. It reeks of “old man yells at cloud” (note, I was also a 90’s kid). It’s the same BS I heard as a kid about how computers would rot your brain or they were horrible for <insert stupid prediction that didn’t come true>.
- throwup238 2y ago
  I agree that it reeks of old men yelling at clouds but there is data driven precedent here: with the advent of smartphones, computer literacy in education has dropped like a rock. It isn’t just kids these days, it’s a genuine shift in computing across the entire populace that happens to really effect the funnel for programmers at the entrance to that funnel. Copilots are an extension of that development, not necessarily something wholly new. I’ve heard this anecdotally from every educator I know at the high school and college level. CS students are increasingly entering without any computer proficiency whatsoever so it has to be built up from scratch.
  - weweweoo 2y ago
    Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work. PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Of course you’ve now effectively circled back to the early 1980s at some level when there was not a lot of expectation that college freshmen had touched a computer much less were proficient even if the wanted major in CS/EE.

joshstrange 2y ago

> Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case? LLMs will not replace us, they just take some of the tedium out of writing code. Yes, they will have to be trained on new frameworks and languages but I don’t see that as a problem. People have to wait for SO questions and blog posts to be written about new frameworks and languages as it stands today. I’m not sure I agree with your arguments about needing a lot of devs to understand assembly or the like. Or rather I disagree with your prediction of where that leads. We are effectively already there and it hasn’t led to your future. We have an amazing open source ecosystem and that billions of people rely on daily without knowing how every part of it works. Open source has only grown during that time. I’ve never done the math myself for calculating the distance between 2 points on a globe. I just grab the Haversine formula and keep going. I don’t see that as a problem. Similarly I’ll reach for an open source library to solve a boring problem instead of doing it myself. I quite literally see no difference in that and using an LLM.

newswasboring 2y ago

> Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware this is a goal for maybe 2% of the industry. And those folks know their assembler or they don't get hired. I think we are producing skills in the proportion of its requirement in the industry.

jayd16 2y ago
Just ask the AI to write your assembly too ;)

jrm4 2y ago

Yeah, solving this problem has just about jack to do with "what is being taught." This is beyond the classroom; this is bad incentives in the market/industry.

mycall 2y ago

> it can't write shit on its own It sure can when you use multiple agents having discussions and optimizing characteristics with each other. CrewAI and AutoGen come to mind.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago

I hate to dash your hopes of never seeing LLMs write code again but Llama3 70B is not terrible as a copilot and it’s small enough to run on comparatively cheap hardware or even consumer hardware when quantized plus it’s publicly available so from now on there will always be some form of copilot service or tool that will be in use, that ship has sailed. The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ve maxed out the capabilities of GPTs yet so as more are trained and compute becomes cheaper and as we produce and accumulate more data they should keep getting better for a while at least.

treflop 2y ago

I agree with you but realistically most people are not ever going to learn that much about their job. The people who really know the inner workings of things are compensated accordingly and there will always be these kind of people.