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"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..." "You

"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..." "You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply." These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding that I think can really inform you about how you might use these tools in work (or life) and where the lines need to be drawn for your own personal circumstance. I can't say I disagree with anything you said and think you've made an insightful observation.

margalabargala 2y ago
In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where AI can immediately produce any arbitrary 20-line glue script that you would have had to think about and remember bash array syntax for, there's not a reason to remember bash array syntax. I don't think we're quite at that point yet but we're astonishingly close.
- aquariusDue 2y ago
  This is both inspiring and terrifying at the same time. That being said I usually prefer to do something the long and manual way, write the process down sometimes, and afterwards search for easier ways to do it. Of course this makes sense on a case by case basis depending on your personal context. Maybe stuff like crosswords and more will undergo a renaissance and we'll see more interesting developments like Gauguin[0] which is a blend of Sudoku and math. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/
- treflop 2y ago
  Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.
  - Mengkudulangsat 2y ago
    Hopefully that happens rare enough that when it does, we can call upon highly-paid human experts that still remembers the art of doing long divisions.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that. AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer. It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow. That bar is really not far away.
    - treflop 2y ago
      You’re changing the goal post. Your original post was saying that you don’t need to know fundamentals. It was not about whether AI is useful or not.
      - margalabargala 2y ago
        I'm not changing goalposts, I was responding to what you said about AI spitting out something wrong and you spending 3 hours debugging it. My original point about not needing fundamentals would obviously require AI to, y'know, not hallucinate errors that take three hours to debug. We're clearly not there yet. The original goalposts remain the same. Since human conversations often flow from one topic to another, in addition to the goal post of "not needing fundamentals" in my original post, my second post introduced a goalpost of "being broadly useful". You're correct that it's not the same goalpost as in my first comment, which is not unexpected, as the comment in question is also not my first comment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nkrisc 2y ago
  > If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454" And if it spits out 15,395,143 I hope you remember enough math to know that doesn’t look right, and how to find the actual answer if you don’t trust your calculator’s answer.
  - Baeocystin 2y ago
    Sanity Checking Expected Output is one of the most vital skills a person can have. It really is. But knowing the general shape of the thing is different than any particular algorithm, don't you think?
    - bruce511 2y ago
      This gets to the root of the issue. The use case, and user experience, and thus outcome is, is remarkably different depending on your current ability. Using AI to learn things is useful, because it helps you get terminology right, and helps you Google search well. For example say you need to know a Windows API, you can describe it snd get the name. Then Google how that works. As an experienced user you can get it to write code. You're good enough to spot errors in the vote and basically just correct as you go. 90% right is good enough. It's the in-between space which is hardest. You're an inexperienced dev looking to produce, not learn. But you lack the experience and knowledge to recognise the errors, or bad patterns, or whatever. Using AI you end up with stuff that's 'mostly right' - which in programming terms means broken. This experience difference is why there's so much chatter about usefulness. To some groups it's very useful. To others it's a dangerous crutch.
- antasvara 2y ago
  The value isn't in rote calculation, but the intuition that doing it gives you. So yes, it's pretty useless for me to manually divide arbitrarily large numbers. But it's super useful for me to be able to reason around fractions and how that division plays out in practice. Same goes for bash. Knowing the exact syntax is useless, but knowing what that glue script does and how it works is essential to understanding how your entire program works. That's the piece I'm scared of. I've seen enough kids through tutoring that just plug numbers into their calculator arbitrarily. They don't have any clue when a number is off by a factor of 10 or what a reasonable calculation looks like. They don't really have a sense for when something is "too complicated" either, as the calculator does all of the work.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    I totally agree. The neat thing about AI generated bash scripts, would be that the AI can comment their code. So the user can 1) check if the comment for each step match what they expect to be done, and 2) have a starting point to debug if something goes wrong.
  - behringer 2y ago
    Go ahead and ask chat gpt how that glue script works. You'll be incredibly satisfied at its detailed insights.
- eyegor 2y ago
  I don't honestly think anyone can remember bash array syntax if they take a 2 week break. It's the kind of arcane nonsense that LLMs are perfect for. The only downside is if the fancy autocomplete model messes it up, we're gonna be in bad shape when Steve retires cause half the internet will be an ouroboros of ai generated garbage.
kamaal 2y ago
>>I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... Well that's not how LLMs work. Don't use an LLM to do thinking for you. You use LLMs to work for you, while you tell(after thinking) it what's to be done. Basically things like- . Attach a click handler to this button with x, y, z params and on click route it to the path /a/b/c . Change the color of this header to purple. . Parse the json in param 'payload' and pick up the value under this>then>that and return etc. kind of dictation. You don't ask big questions like 'Write me a todo app', or 'Write me this dashboard'. Those are too broad questions. You will still continue to code and work like you always have. Except that you now have a good coding assistant that will do the chore of typing for you.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Maybe I'm too good at my editor (currently Emacs, previously Vim), but the fact is that I can type all of this faster than dictating it to an AI and verifying its output.
  - kamaal 2y ago
    Yes, editor proficiency is something that beats these things any day. In fact if you are familiar with keyboard macros, in both vim and emacs you can do a lot of text heavy lifting tasks. I don't see these as opposing traits. One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both?
    - skydhash 2y ago
      > One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both? I mostly use manuals, books, and the occasional forum searches. And the advantage is that you pick surrounding knowledge. And more consistent writing. And today, I know where some of the good stuff are. You're not supposed to learn everything in one go. I built a knowledge map where I can find what I want in a more straightforward manner. No need to enter in a symbiosis with an LLM.
      - 2y ago

margalabargala 2y ago

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where AI can immediately produce any arbitrary 20-line glue script that you would have had to think about and remember bash array syntax for, there's not a reason to remember bash array syntax. I don't think we're quite at that point yet but we're astonishingly close.

aquariusDue 2y ago
This is both inspiring and terrifying at the same time. That being said I usually prefer to do something the long and manual way, write the process down sometimes, and afterwards search for easier ways to do it. Of course this makes sense on a case by case basis depending on your personal context. Maybe stuff like crosswords and more will undergo a renaissance and we'll see more interesting developments like Gauguin[0] which is a blend of Sudoku and math. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/
treflop 2y ago
Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.
- Mengkudulangsat 2y ago
  Hopefully that happens rare enough that when it does, we can call upon highly-paid human experts that still remembers the art of doing long divisions.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that. AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer. It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow. That bar is really not far away.
  - treflop 2y ago
    You’re changing the goal post. Your original post was saying that you don’t need to know fundamentals. It was not about whether AI is useful or not.
    - margalabargala 2y ago
      I'm not changing goalposts, I was responding to what you said about AI spitting out something wrong and you spending 3 hours debugging it. My original point about not needing fundamentals would obviously require AI to, y'know, not hallucinate errors that take three hours to debug. We're clearly not there yet. The original goalposts remain the same. Since human conversations often flow from one topic to another, in addition to the goal post of "not needing fundamentals" in my original post, my second post introduced a goalpost of "being broadly useful". You're correct that it's not the same goalpost as in my first comment, which is not unexpected, as the comment in question is also not my first comment.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nkrisc 2y ago
> If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454" And if it spits out 15,395,143 I hope you remember enough math to know that doesn’t look right, and how to find the actual answer if you don’t trust your calculator’s answer.
- Baeocystin 2y ago
  Sanity Checking Expected Output is one of the most vital skills a person can have. It really is. But knowing the general shape of the thing is different than any particular algorithm, don't you think?
  - bruce511 2y ago
    This gets to the root of the issue. The use case, and user experience, and thus outcome is, is remarkably different depending on your current ability. Using AI to learn things is useful, because it helps you get terminology right, and helps you Google search well. For example say you need to know a Windows API, you can describe it snd get the name. Then Google how that works. As an experienced user you can get it to write code. You're good enough to spot errors in the vote and basically just correct as you go. 90% right is good enough. It's the in-between space which is hardest. You're an inexperienced dev looking to produce, not learn. But you lack the experience and knowledge to recognise the errors, or bad patterns, or whatever. Using AI you end up with stuff that's 'mostly right' - which in programming terms means broken. This experience difference is why there's so much chatter about usefulness. To some groups it's very useful. To others it's a dangerous crutch.
antasvara 2y ago
The value isn't in rote calculation, but the intuition that doing it gives you. So yes, it's pretty useless for me to manually divide arbitrarily large numbers. But it's super useful for me to be able to reason around fractions and how that division plays out in practice. Same goes for bash. Knowing the exact syntax is useless, but knowing what that glue script does and how it works is essential to understanding how your entire program works. That's the piece I'm scared of. I've seen enough kids through tutoring that just plug numbers into their calculator arbitrarily. They don't have any clue when a number is off by a factor of 10 or what a reasonable calculation looks like. They don't really have a sense for when something is "too complicated" either, as the calculator does all of the work.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  I totally agree. The neat thing about AI generated bash scripts, would be that the AI can comment their code. So the user can 1) check if the comment for each step match what they expect to be done, and 2) have a starting point to debug if something goes wrong.
- behringer 2y ago
  Go ahead and ask chat gpt how that glue script works. You'll be incredibly satisfied at its detailed insights.
eyegor 2y ago
I don't honestly think anyone can remember bash array syntax if they take a 2 week break. It's the kind of arcane nonsense that LLMs are perfect for. The only downside is if the fancy autocomplete model messes it up, we're gonna be in bad shape when Steve retires cause half the internet will be an ouroboros of ai generated garbage.

kamaal 2y ago

>>I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... Well that's not how LLMs work. Don't use an LLM to do thinking for you. You use LLMs to work for you, while you tell(after thinking) it what's to be done. Basically things like- . Attach a click handler to this button with x, y, z params and on click route it to the path /a/b/c . Change the color of this header to purple. . Parse the json in param 'payload' and pick up the value under this>then>that and return etc. kind of dictation. You don't ask big questions like 'Write me a todo app', or 'Write me this dashboard'. Those are too broad questions. You will still continue to code and work like you always have. Except that you now have a good coding assistant that will do the chore of typing for you.

skydhash 2y ago
Maybe I'm too good at my editor (currently Emacs, previously Vim), but the fact is that I can type all of this faster than dictating it to an AI and verifying its output.
- kamaal 2y ago
  Yes, editor proficiency is something that beats these things any day. In fact if you are familiar with keyboard macros, in both vim and emacs you can do a lot of text heavy lifting tasks. I don't see these as opposing traits. One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both?
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both? I mostly use manuals, books, and the occasional forum searches. And the advantage is that you pick surrounding knowledge. And more consistent writing. And today, I know where some of the good stuff are. You're not supposed to learn everything in one go. I built a knowledge map where I can find what I want in a more straightforward manner. No need to enter in a symbiosis with an LLM.
    - 2y ago