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The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something tha

The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work. You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.
stackghost 2y ago
>The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work. Busy work is work that is assigned merely for the purpose of occupying one's time. That's not the same thing as practice. We drill children in arithmetic not to keep them busy but because it turns out repeatedly solving multiplication problems is an effective way to teach children their times tables.
- ghostpepper 2y ago
  This may be why the practice was invented but I bet there are plenty of teachers who see it more as a way to keep them busy
  - stackghost 2y ago
    Yes, intent matters.
- hbosch 2y ago
  >That's not the same thing as practice. Exactly right. In terms of education, there generally seems to be a blurry line between was is considered learning and what is considered memorization. If you memorize your times tables, it doesn't mean you've learned multiplication for example... oftentimes the ability to memorize and recall things is opposed to learning, which means leveraging previous knowledge to solve something new. In the case of AI, it usually presents facts and opinions simultaneously (something a calculator famously does not do, for example). Facts are memorized, opinions are learned. In all core studies it's always been more important to understand what you're solving for, and why, rather than "how" to solve it. The continued dissolution of the "how" barrier is a net benefit for all of civilization, and when experts of "why" are valued more than experts of "how" the world will be a much better place.
  - nunez 2y ago
    This is one reason why many educators are phasing out homework. It's great practice but can easily lead students to regurgitating information instead of understanding and retaining knowledge. This is also why quizzes and tests are vital in a well-designed curriculum: they test understanding (or at least are supposed to).
whimsicalism 2y ago
I love that AI negativity on HN is so strong that we reclassify whatever work AI can do into “busy work” as soon as it is possible.
- aimazon 2y ago
  That’s not my point. I’m not disparaging AI. I described AI as modern tooling that is beneficial to learn. I’m sure there are many professional developers saving time using AI to generate code they would have otherwise written. My point is that in this specific case, AI didn’t enable anything useful. I would have said exactly the same if the OP had written the code without AI. If a problem is long solved, reinventing it is busy work. Busy work can be fun, I reinvent things all the time, but that doesn’t change the nature of it. If the project they had built had been something novel (that does not exist) then it would have not been busy work. I was shit talking education if anything :)
  - valval 2y ago
    So your definition of busy work isn’t “work AI can do”. It’s “work that accomplishes things that have already been accomplished before”. The latter is even sillier. Your position might be indefensible.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
> you reinvented something that already exists Since AI can’t invent new stuff, who will do that? Juniors who haven’t learned anything because of those tools? Or seniors who will disappear one day because they are retiring or are being replaced by AIs? I already work with juniors who use ChatGPT and cannot explain what they wrote. They have a fucking engineers degree and don’t know anything. It’s catastrophic and may increase in the future. What will happen if it continues like this?
- aimazon 2y ago
  code is an input not an output. People don’t care about code, they care about products. You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before. My point wasn’t that writing code with AI is bad, my point was that writing code for the sake of writing code is bad. If something already exists, use it. If something doesn’t exist, build it, bring something new to the world — whether that’s with hand-typed code or ChatGPT assisted code, I don’t care. I think we should write less code.
  - jpc0 2y ago
    > You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before. I don't disagree with this from a business perspective but for an engineers perspective I find it severely limiting. Even very very basic things should probably stay fresh foe you. If you cannot implement a basic parser ( recursive dexent / pratt etc) you will very likely reach for regex when there is likely a better solution that isn't a lot of code. You should probably know how to write leftpad... Or how to strip ascii whitespace using an ArrayBuffer and a for loop in JS. These are things that is extremely easy but a little tedius to do but are fundamental skill to building up more complex solutions later. You should probably know how to build and reason about some more advanced datastructures in your language. Basic trees, directed graphs, trie. These are things that if they are second nature for you to implement you can come up with novel solutions to actually novel problems when they come up. You also get an innate understanding of where the performance characteristics of certian algorithms and datastructures actually lay. Because big O doesn't always tell the full story...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pclmulqdq 2y ago

When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.

stackghost 2y ago

>The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work. Busy work is work that is assigned merely for the purpose of occupying one's time. That's not the same thing as practice. We drill children in arithmetic not to keep them busy but because it turns out repeatedly solving multiplication problems is an effective way to teach children their times tables.

ghostpepper 2y ago
This may be why the practice was invented but I bet there are plenty of teachers who see it more as a way to keep them busy
- stackghost 2y ago
  Yes, intent matters.
hbosch 2y ago
>That's not the same thing as practice. Exactly right. In terms of education, there generally seems to be a blurry line between was is considered learning and what is considered memorization. If you memorize your times tables, it doesn't mean you've learned multiplication for example... oftentimes the ability to memorize and recall things is opposed to learning, which means leveraging previous knowledge to solve something new. In the case of AI, it usually presents facts and opinions simultaneously (something a calculator famously does not do, for example). Facts are memorized, opinions are learned. In all core studies it's always been more important to understand what you're solving for, and why, rather than "how" to solve it. The continued dissolution of the "how" barrier is a net benefit for all of civilization, and when experts of "why" are valued more than experts of "how" the world will be a much better place.
- nunez 2y ago
  This is one reason why many educators are phasing out homework. It's great practice but can easily lead students to regurgitating information instead of understanding and retaining knowledge. This is also why quizzes and tests are vital in a well-designed curriculum: they test understanding (or at least are supposed to).

whimsicalism 2y ago

I love that AI negativity on HN is so strong that we reclassify whatever work AI can do into “busy work” as soon as it is possible.

aimazon 2y ago
That’s not my point. I’m not disparaging AI. I described AI as modern tooling that is beneficial to learn. I’m sure there are many professional developers saving time using AI to generate code they would have otherwise written. My point is that in this specific case, AI didn’t enable anything useful. I would have said exactly the same if the OP had written the code without AI. If a problem is long solved, reinventing it is busy work. Busy work can be fun, I reinvent things all the time, but that doesn’t change the nature of it. If the project they had built had been something novel (that does not exist) then it would have not been busy work. I was shit talking education if anything :)
- valval 2y ago
  So your definition of busy work isn’t “work AI can do”. It’s “work that accomplishes things that have already been accomplished before”. The latter is even sillier. Your position might be indefensible.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago

> you reinvented something that already exists Since AI can’t invent new stuff, who will do that? Juniors who haven’t learned anything because of those tools? Or seniors who will disappear one day because they are retiring or are being replaced by AIs? I already work with juniors who use ChatGPT and cannot explain what they wrote. They have a fucking engineers degree and don’t know anything. It’s catastrophic and may increase in the future. What will happen if it continues like this?

aimazon 2y ago
code is an input not an output. People don’t care about code, they care about products. You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before. My point wasn’t that writing code with AI is bad, my point was that writing code for the sake of writing code is bad. If something already exists, use it. If something doesn’t exist, build it, bring something new to the world — whether that’s with hand-typed code or ChatGPT assisted code, I don’t care. I think we should write less code.
- jpc0 2y ago
  > You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before. I don't disagree with this from a business perspective but for an engineers perspective I find it severely limiting. Even very very basic things should probably stay fresh foe you. If you cannot implement a basic parser ( recursive dexent / pratt etc) you will very likely reach for regex when there is likely a better solution that isn't a lot of code. You should probably know how to write leftpad... Or how to strip ascii whitespace using an ArrayBuffer and a for loop in JS. These are things that is extremely easy but a little tedius to do but are fundamental skill to building up more complex solutions later. You should probably know how to build and reason about some more advanced datastructures in your language. Basic trees, directed graphs, trie. These are things that if they are second nature for you to implement you can come up with novel solutions to actually novel problems when they come up. You also get an innate understanding of where the performance characteristics of certian algorithms and datastructures actually lay. Because big O doesn't always tell the full story...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]