5 ms·

Are they learning? Or are they just accepting the results, as long as it appears to more or less do what they want, and moving on? The danger seems to be code

Are they learning? Or are they just accepting the results, as long as it appears to more or less do what they want, and moving on? The danger seems to be code that is syntactically correct and compiles without errors, but is logically incorrect.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Oh come on, the user is talking about building UIs. I don't know how else you learn. Your attitude just reeks of high-horse. As if it was better to learn things from stackoverflow.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Who learned stuff from stack overflow? In my own case, it was all books, plus a few videos. Stack Overflow was mostly to know why things has gone (errors not explicit enough) or very specific patterns. And there was a peer review system which lent credibility to answers.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    “In my own case...” something worked for you. So what? Are you sure that would work for others? And that other approaches might not be more effective? I’ve learned lots of things from SO. The top voted answers usually provide quite a bit of “why” content which have general utility or pointers to more general content. Yes, there are insufferable people on there, but there are gatekeepers and self-centered people everywhere.
    - irrational 2y ago
      I’ll add to their anecdote, with my own. I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from SO. It is books and occasional videos for me too.
      - shermantanktop 2y ago
        Maybe I am being snarky, but saying “I don’t like that” or “that’s not how I did it” just isn’t that interesting. I’d love to hear why books are so much effective, for instance, or which books, or what YT channels were useful.
        skydhash 2y ago
        > why books are so much effective Because they’re consistent and they follow (the good ones) a clear path to learn what you want to learn. The explanations may not be obvious at first glance and that’s when you may need somone to present to you in another perspective (your teacher) or provide the required foundational knowledge that you may lack. You pair it with some practice or do cross-reference with other books and you can get very far. Also they’re can be pretty dense in terms of information. > which books, or what YT channels were useful. I mostly read manuals nowadays, instead of tutorials. But I remember starting with the “Site du Zero” books (a French platform) for C and Python. As tech is moving rapidly, for tutorial like books, it’s important to get the latest one and know which software versions it’s referring to. Now I keep books like “Programming Clojure”, “The GO Programming Language”, “Write Great Code” series, “Mastering Emacs”, “The TCP/IP Guide”, “Absolute FreeBSD”, “Using SQlite”, etc. They’re mostly for references purposes and deep dive in one subject. The videos I’m talking about were Courses from Coursera and MIT. Algorithms, Android Programming, Theory of Computation. There are great videos on Youtube, but they’re hidden under all the worthless one.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
This is just how learning happens either way. As a noob I copied code from Railscasts or Stack Overflow or docs or IRC without understanding it just to get things working. And then at some point I was doing less and less of it, and then rarely at all. But what if the code I copied isn't correct?! Didn't the sky fall down? Well, things would break and I would have to figure out why or steal a better solution, and then I could observe the delta between what didn't work vs what worked. And boom, learning happened. LLMs just speed that cycle up tremendously. The concern trolling over LLMs basically imagines a hypothetical person who can't learn anything and doesn't care. More power to them imo if they can build what they want without understanding it. That's a cracked lazy person we all should fear.
userbinator 2y ago
Or more insidiously, is correct for everything except the edge cases.
thomashop 2y ago
One data point: In our startup we are short on frontend software engineers. Our project manager started helping with the UI using an IDE (cursor a VS-code fork) with native ChatGPT integration. In the span of six months, they have become very proficient at React. They had wanted to learn basic frontend coding for multiple years but never managed to pass the initial hurdles. Initially, they were only accepting suggestions made by ChatGPT and making frequent errors, but over time, they started understanding the code better and actively telling the LLM how to improve/fix it. Now, I believe they would have the knowledge to build simple functional React frontends without assistance, but the question is why? As a team with an LLM-augmented workflow, we are very productive.
- Lonota 2y ago
  Sounds like a great learning tool. Not gonna fault people for learning, think the FUD is more so in the vein of being ignorant while working. Yea, you dont really need to know how transistors work to code, but you didnt need that for 2 generations. Personally think (and hope), LLM code tools replace google and SO, more so than writing SW itself. I got my start on a no-code visual editor. Hated it because the 5% of issues it couldn't handle took 80% of my time (with no way to actually do it in many cases). See LLM auto generation as the same, the problems that the tool dosent just solve will be your jobs, and you still need to know things for that.
- skydhash 2y ago
  With the number of anti patterns in React, are you sure everything’s OK? The thing’s about declarative is that it’s more like writing equations. Imperative have a tighter feedback loop, and ultimately only code organization is a issue. But so many things can go wrong with declarative as it’s one level higher in the abstraction stack. I’m not saying that React is hard to learn. But I believe buying a good book would have them get there quicker.
  - thomashop 2y ago
    Yes totally. They already tried doing a few online courses and had a few books. I'm a senior React Dev and the code is totally fine. No more anti-patterns than juniors who I've worked with who learned without AI. The contrary actually.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Oh come on, the user is talking about building UIs. I don't know how else you learn. Your attitude just reeks of high-horse. As if it was better to learn things from stackoverflow.

skydhash 2y ago
Who learned stuff from stack overflow? In my own case, it was all books, plus a few videos. Stack Overflow was mostly to know why things has gone (errors not explicit enough) or very specific patterns. And there was a peer review system which lent credibility to answers.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  “In my own case...” something worked for you. So what? Are you sure that would work for others? And that other approaches might not be more effective? I’ve learned lots of things from SO. The top voted answers usually provide quite a bit of “why” content which have general utility or pointers to more general content. Yes, there are insufferable people on there, but there are gatekeepers and self-centered people everywhere.
  - irrational 2y ago
    I’ll add to their anecdote, with my own. I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from SO. It is books and occasional videos for me too.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      Maybe I am being snarky, but saying “I don’t like that” or “that’s not how I did it” just isn’t that interesting. I’d love to hear why books are so much effective, for instance, or which books, or what YT channels were useful.
      - skydhash 2y ago
        > why books are so much effective Because they’re consistent and they follow (the good ones) a clear path to learn what you want to learn. The explanations may not be obvious at first glance and that’s when you may need somone to present to you in another perspective (your teacher) or provide the required foundational knowledge that you may lack. You pair it with some practice or do cross-reference with other books and you can get very far. Also they’re can be pretty dense in terms of information. > which books, or what YT channels were useful. I mostly read manuals nowadays, instead of tutorials. But I remember starting with the “Site du Zero” books (a French platform) for C and Python. As tech is moving rapidly, for tutorial like books, it’s important to get the latest one and know which software versions it’s referring to. Now I keep books like “Programming Clojure”, “The GO Programming Language”, “Write Great Code” series, “Mastering Emacs”, “The TCP/IP Guide”, “Absolute FreeBSD”, “Using SQlite”, etc. They’re mostly for references purposes and deep dive in one subject. The videos I’m talking about were Courses from Coursera and MIT. Algorithms, Android Programming, Theory of Computation. There are great videos on Youtube, but they’re hidden under all the worthless one.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

This is just how learning happens either way. As a noob I copied code from Railscasts or Stack Overflow or docs or IRC without understanding it just to get things working. And then at some point I was doing less and less of it, and then rarely at all. But what if the code I copied isn't correct?! Didn't the sky fall down? Well, things would break and I would have to figure out why or steal a better solution, and then I could observe the delta between what didn't work vs what worked. And boom, learning happened. LLMs just speed that cycle up tremendously. The concern trolling over LLMs basically imagines a hypothetical person who can't learn anything and doesn't care. More power to them imo if they can build what they want without understanding it. That's a cracked lazy person we all should fear.

userbinator 2y ago

Or more insidiously, is correct for everything except the edge cases.

thomashop 2y ago

One data point: In our startup we are short on frontend software engineers. Our project manager started helping with the UI using an IDE (cursor a VS-code fork) with native ChatGPT integration. In the span of six months, they have become very proficient at React. They had wanted to learn basic frontend coding for multiple years but never managed to pass the initial hurdles. Initially, they were only accepting suggestions made by ChatGPT and making frequent errors, but over time, they started understanding the code better and actively telling the LLM how to improve/fix it. Now, I believe they would have the knowledge to build simple functional React frontends without assistance, but the question is why? As a team with an LLM-augmented workflow, we are very productive.

Lonota 2y ago
Sounds like a great learning tool. Not gonna fault people for learning, think the FUD is more so in the vein of being ignorant while working. Yea, you dont really need to know how transistors work to code, but you didnt need that for 2 generations. Personally think (and hope), LLM code tools replace google and SO, more so than writing SW itself. I got my start on a no-code visual editor. Hated it because the 5% of issues it couldn't handle took 80% of my time (with no way to actually do it in many cases). See LLM auto generation as the same, the problems that the tool dosent just solve will be your jobs, and you still need to know things for that.
skydhash 2y ago
With the number of anti patterns in React, are you sure everything’s OK? The thing’s about declarative is that it’s more like writing equations. Imperative have a tighter feedback loop, and ultimately only code organization is a issue. But so many things can go wrong with declarative as it’s one level higher in the abstraction stack. I’m not saying that React is hard to learn. But I believe buying a good book would have them get there quicker.
- thomashop 2y ago
  Yes totally. They already tried doing a few online courses and had a few books. I'm a senior React Dev and the code is totally fine. No more anti-patterns than juniors who I've worked with who learned without AI. The contrary actually.