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Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't re

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for studying but I doubt it and only goes so far, when started I remember being able to extract so much knowledge just by reading a book about algorithms, try to reimplement things, break them, and so on. Today I can use an LLM because I'm wise enough and I can spot wrong answers, but still feel becoming a bit lazy.

0x1062 2y ago
AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.
- GlacierFox 2y ago
  The point he's making is, we still have to learn to use tools no? There still had to he some knowledge there or else you're just sat sifting through all the crap the AI spits out endlessly for the rest of your life. The op wrote his comment like it's a complete replacement rather than an enhancement.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Tool use can make you lazy if you're not careful.
- 4ndr3vv 2y ago
  You could similarly consider driving a car as "a tool that helps me get to X quicker". Now tell me cars don't make you lazy.
- eviks 2y ago
  It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
  - logicchains 2y ago
    When you go for a job as a forklift operator, nobody asks you to demonstrate how you can manually carry a load of timber.
    - eviks 2y ago
      You forgot a second sentence that completes the logic chain. Yes, "some tools are useful for some work", so what? That wasn't the original claim...
      - logicchains 2y ago
        The claim was that it's lazy to use a tool as a substitute for learning how to do something yourself. But when the tool entirely obviates the need for doing the task yourself, you don't need to be able to do it yourself to do the job. It doesn't matter if a forklift driver isn't strong enough to manually carry a load, similarly once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced.
        skissane 2y ago
        > once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced. Once AI is that good, the developer won't have a job any more.
        necovek 2y ago
        The whole question is if the AI will ever get that good? All evidence so far points to no (just like with every tool — farmers are still usually strong men even if they've got tractors that are thousands of times stronger than any human), but that still leaves a bunch of non-great programmers out of a job.
- Matthyze 2y ago
  Tools can be crutches — useful but ultimately inhibitory to developing advanced skill.
- numpad0 2y ago
  AI companies don't think so, is clearly the implication.
- mathieuh 2y ago
  I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it. Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so. Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer. I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before.
  - necovek 2y ago
    I think you are both right. AI will let some people conquer skills otherwise out of their reach, with all the pros and cons of that. It is exactly like the example someone else brought up of not needing to know assembly anymore with higher level languages: true, but those who do know it and can internalize how the machines operate have an easier time when it comes to figuring out the real hard problems and bugs they might hit. Which means that you only need to learn machine language and assembly superficially, and you have a good chance of being a very good programmer. However, where I am unsure how the things will unfold is that humans are constantly coming up with different programming languages, frameworks, patterns, because none of the existing ones really fit their mental model or are too much to learn about. Which — to me at least — hints at what I've long claimed: programming is more art than science. With complex interactions between a gazillion of mildly incompatible systems, even more so. As such, for someone with strong fundamentals, AI tools never provided much of a boon to me (yet). Incidentally, neither did StackOverflow ever help me: I never found a problem that I struggled with that wasn't easily solved with reading the upstream docs or upstream code, and when neither was available or good enough, SO was mostly crickets too. These days, I rarely do "gruntwork" programming, and only get called in on really hard problems, so the question switches to: how will we train the next generation of software engineers who are going to be called in for those hard problems? Because let's admit it, even today, not everybody can handle them.
- deleted 2y ago
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- waste_monk 2y ago
  Tool use is fine, when you have the education and experience to use the tools properly, and to troubleshoot and recover when things go wrong. The use of AI is not just a labour saving device, it allows the user to bypass thinking and learning. It robs the user of an opportunity to grow. If you don't have the experience to know better it may be able to masquerade as a teacher and a problem solver, but beyond a trivial level relying on it is actively harmful to one's education. At some point the user will encounter a problem that has no existing answer in the AI's training dataset, and come to realise they have no real foundation to rely on. Code generative AI, as it currently exists, is a poisoned chalice.
- antihipocrat 2y ago
  Using the wrong tool for the job required isn't lazy but it may be dangerous, inefficient and ultimately more expensive.
- Fricken 2y ago
  Tools help us to put layers of abstraction between us and our goals. when things become too abstracted we lose sight of what we're really doing or why. Tools allow us to feel smart and productive while acting stupidly, and against our best interests. So we get fascism and catastrophic climate change, stuff like that. Tools create dependencies. We can't imagine life without our tools. "We shape our tools and our tools in turn shape us" said Marshall McLuhan.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  For learning it can very well be. And also it really depends on the tool and task. Calculator is fine tool. But symbolic solver might be a few steps too far. If you don't already understand the process. And possibly the start and end points. Problem with AI is that it is often black box tool. And not even deterministic one.
  - necovek 2y ago
    AI as applied today is pretty deterministic. It does get retrained and tuned often in most common applications like ChatGPT, but without any changes, you should expect a deterministic answer.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  Copying and pasting from stack overflow is a tool. It’s fine to do in some cases, but it certainly gets abused by lazy incurious people. Tool use in general certainly can be lazy. A car is a tool, but most people would call an able bodied person driving their car to the end of the driveway to get the mail lazy.
GlacierFox 2y ago
You perfectly encapsulated my view on this. I'm utterly bewildered with people who take the opposing position that AI is essentially a complete replacement for the human mind and you'd be stupid not to fully embrace it as your thought process.
- deleted 2y ago
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noufalibrahim 2y ago
This is a straightforward position and it's the one I hold but I had to reply to thank you for stating it so succinctly.
risyachka 2y ago
Not lazy per se, but you stop thinking and start relying on AI to think for you. And you must use that brain muscles otherwise your skills became to degrade fast, like really fast. As long as you ask llm What - or high level How - you should be good. As soon as you ask for (more than trivial) code or solutions - you start losing your skill and value as a developer.
sho_hn 2y ago
I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who was enjoying many of the obvious benefits - availability, tailoring information to his inquiry, etc. So we cut a deal: We'd use the same ChatGPT account and I could keep an eye on his interactions with the system, so I could help him when the AI went off the rails and was steering him into the wrong direction. He initially made fast progress on the project I was helping him with, and was able to put more working code in place than others in the same phase. But then he hit a plateau really hard soon after, because he was running into bugs and issues he couldn't get solutions from the AI for and he just wasn't able to connect the dots himself. He'd almost get there, but would sometimes forget to remove random single lines doing the wrong thing, etc. His mental map of the code was poor, because he hadn't written it himself in that oldschool "every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works and how it connects to problems you're solving. As a result he'd get frustrated and had bouts of absenteeism next, because there wasn't any string of rewards and little victories there but just listless poking in the mud. To his credit, he eventually realized leaning on ChatGPT was holding him back mentally and he tried to take things slower and go back to API docs and slowly building up his codebase by himself.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > listless poking in the mud https://xkcd.com/1838/ https://xkcd.com/1838/
- Shinchy 2y ago
  '"every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works' I totally agree with this and I really like that way of wording it.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?
raincole 2y ago
Use LLM. But do not let it be the sole source of your information for any particular field. I think it's one of the most important disciplines the younger generation - to be honest, all generations - will have to learn. I have a rule for myself as a non-native English speaker: Any day I ask LLMs to fix my English, I must read 10 pages from traditionally published books (preferably pre-2023). Just to prevent LLM from dominating my language comprehension.
- sshine 2y ago
  I use LLMs as a translation tool, and make sure to generate JSON flashcards. Sometimes it is more important to get a point across in another language than it is to learn that language. Computers being automatable, you can use it to create a backlog for when you skipped learning so that you can maintain some control of your habit of not learning what you're saying.
teekert 2y ago
Feeling "Lazy" is just an emotion, which to me has nothing to do with how productive you are as a human. In fact the people not feeling lazy but hyped are probably more effective and productive. You're just doing this to yourself because you have assumptions on how a productive/effective human should function. You could call it "stuck in the past". I have the idea that there are 2 kinds of people, those avidly against AI because it makes mistakes (it sure does) and makes one lazy and all other kinds of negative things, and those that experiment and find a place for it but aren't that vocal about it. Sure you can go too far, I've heard someone in Quality Control Proclaim "ChatGPT just knows everything, its saves me so much time!" To which I asked if they heart about hallucinations and they hadn't, they'd just been copying whatever it said into their reports. Which is certainly problematic.
lemagedurage 2y ago
I think the same kind of critical thinking that was required to reimplement and break algorithms must now be used to untangle AIs answers. In that way, it's a new skill, with its own muscle memory. Previously learnt skills like debugging segfaults slowly become less relevant.
Terr_ 2y ago
> LLMs just make you lazy. Yeah, and I'd like to emphasize that this is qualitatively different from older gripes such as "calculators make kids lazy in math." This is because LLMs' have an amazing ability to dream up responses stuffed with traditional signals of truthfulness, care, engagement, honesty etc... but that ability is not matched by their chances of dreaming up answers and ideas that are logically true. This gap is inevitable from their current design, and it means users are given signals that it's safe for their brains to think-less-hard (skepticism, critical analysis) about what's being returned at the same moments when they need to use their minds the most. That's new. A calculator doesn't flatter you or pretend to be a wise professor with a big vocabulary listening very closely to your problems.
reactordev 2y ago
Learning comes from focus and repetition. Talent comes from knowing which skill to use. Using AI effectively is a talent. Some of us embrace learning new skills while others hold onto the past. AI is here to stay, sorry. You can either learn to adapt to it or you can slowly die. The argument that AI is bad and anyone who uses it ends up in a tangled mess is only your perspective and your experience. I’m way more productive using AI to help me than I ever was before. Yes, I proofread the result. Yes, I can discern a good response from a bad one. AI isn’t a replacement for knowing how to code, but it can be an extremely valuable teacher to those orgs that lack proper training. Any company that has the position that AI is bad, and lacks proper training and incentives for those that want to learn new skills, isn’t a company I ever want to work for.
pinoy420 2y ago
You sound like the sort of person of old who “Why would you use the internet. Look in an encyclopaedia. ‘Google it’ is just lazy” This trope is unbecoming of anyone sensible.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  It's 2025, not 2015. 'google it and add the word reddit' is a thing. For now. Google 'reflections on trusting trust'. Your level of trust in software that purports to think for you out of a multi-gig stew of word associations is pretty intense, but I wouldn't call it pretty sensible.
  - pinoy420 2y ago
    What on earth does that drivel even say. Did you generate this from a heavily quantised gpt2?
- hollowturtle 2y ago
  That's not what my comment implies. I'm just saying that relying solely on LLMs makes you lazy, like relying just on google/stackoverflow whatever, it doesn't shift you from a resource that can be layed off to a resource that can't. You must know your art, and use the tools wisely
elpocko 2y ago
Talent is innate. Proficiency requires practice.
blensor 2y ago
I can even feel it in my own coding. I've been coding almost my entire life all the way back to C64 Basic and ever since I am relying on Copilot for most of my regular work I can feel my non AI assisted coding skills get rusty. That's a scary thing
Narciss 2y ago
I hear this argument all the time, and I think “this is exactly how people who coded in assembly back in the day thought about those using higher level programming languages.” It is a paradigm shift, yes. And you will know less about the implementation at times, yes. But will you care when you can deploy things twice, three times, five times as fast as the person not using AI? No. And also, when you want to learn more about a specific bit of the AI written code, you can simply delve deep into it by asking the AI questions. The AI right now may not be perfect, so yes you still need to know how to code. But in 5 years from now? Chances are you will go in your favorite app builder, state what you want, tweak what you get and you will get the product that you want, with maybe one dev making sure every once in a while that you’re not messing things up - maybe. So will new devs need to know high level programming languages? Possibly, but maybe not.
- hollowturtle 2y ago
  You seem so strong opinionated and sure what the future holds for us, but I must remember you though, that in your example "from assembly to higher level programming languages" the demand for programmers didn't go down, went up, and as companies were able to develop more, more development and more investments were made, more challenges showed up, new jobs were invented and so on... You get where I'm going... The thing I'm questioning is how much lazy new technologies make you, many programmers even before LLMs had no idea how a computer works and only programmed in higher level languages, it was a disaster before with many people claming software was bad and industry going down a road where software quality matters less and less. Well that situation turbo boosted by an LLMs because "doesn't matter i can deploy 100x times a day" disrupting user experience imo won't led us far
- sarchertech 2y ago
  1. We still teach assembly to students. Having a mental model of what the computer is doing is incredibly helpful. Every good programmer has such a model in my experience. Some of them learned it by studying it explicitly, some picked it up more implicitly. But the former tends to be a whole lot faster without the stop on the way where you are floundering as a mid level with a horribly incorrect model for years (which I’ve seen many many times). 2. Compilers are deterministic. You can recompile the source code and get the same assembly a million times. You can also take a bit of assembly then look at the source code of the compiler and tell exactly where that assembly came from. And you can change the compiler to change that output. 3. Source code is written in a formal unambiguous language. I’m sure LLMs will be great at spitting out green field apps, but unless they evolve to honest to goodness AGI, this won’t get far beyond existing low code solutions. No one has solved or even proposed a solution for any of these issues beyond “the AI will advance sufficiently that humans won’t need to look at the code ever. They’ll never need to interact with it in any way other than through the AI”. But to get to that point will require AGI and the AI won’t need input from humans at all, it won’t need a manager telling it what to build.
eknkc 2y ago
I drove cars before the sat nav systems and when I visited somewhere, I'd learn how to drive to there. The second drive would be from memory. However, as soon as I started relying on sat navs, I became dependent on them. I can not drive to a lot of places that I visited more than once without a sat nav these days (and I'm getting older, that's a part of it too). I wonder if the same thing will happen with coding and LLMs.
- dimitri-vs 2y ago
  Progress is built on top of an infinite number of dependences. In many ways people that don't use sat nav are at a disadvantage: real time traffic and redirection, high precision ETA, trip logging, etc.
- sshine 2y ago
  On a roadtrip ten years back we chose to navigate by map and compass, and avoid highways. With sat nav I don't even try to read the exit signs; I just follow the blue line. It takes me 10-20 drives somewhere before I have the muscle memory, and I never made an active mental effort. Going somewhere by public transportation or foot, e.g. a large homogenic parking lot complex, I consciously make an effort to take mental pictures so I can backtrack or traverse perfectly the second time; in spite of that being mentally challenging, it's still the easiest way I have. I cannot assemble the hardware that I write code for. This is in spite of having access to both the soldering equipment, the parts and the colleagues who are willing to help me. At some point all skills become abstract; efficiency is traded for flexibility when you keep doing the same thing for a very long time. I can still drive a stick shift, but maybe not in 20 years.
jack_pp 2y ago
Let me give you an example from yesterday. I was learning tailwind and had a really long class attribute on a div which I didn't like. I wanted to split it and found a way to do it using my JavaScript framework (the new way to do it was suggested by deepseek). When I started writing by hand the list of classes in the new format copilot gave me an auto complete suggestion after I wrote the first class. I pressed tab and it was done. I showed this to my new colleague who is a bit older than me and sort of had similar attitudes as you. He told me he can do the same with some multi cursor shenanigans and I'll be honest in that I wasn't interested in his approach. Seems like he would've taken more time to solve the same problem even though he had superior technique than me. He said sure it takes longer but I need to verify by reading the whole class list and that's a pain but I just reloaded the page and it was fine. He still wasn't comfortable with me using copilot. So yes, it does make me lazier but you could say the same about using go instead of C or any higher level abstraction. These tools will only get better and more correct. It's our job to figure out where it is appropriate to use them and where it isn't. Going to either extremes is where the issue is
- hollowturtle 2y ago
  Remember though that lazyness, as I learned in computing, is kinda "doing something later": you might have pushed the change/fix faster than your senior fellow programmer, but you still need to review and test that change right? Maybe the change you're talking about was really trivial and you just needed to refresh your browser to see a trivial change, but when it's not, being lazy about a change will only gets you suffer more when reviewing a pr and testing the non trivial change working for thousands customers with different devices
  - jack_pp 2y ago
    The problem is he wasn't comfortable with my solution even though it was clearly faster and it could be tested instantly. It's a mental block for him and a lot of people in this industry. I don't advocate blindly trusting LLMs. I don't either and of course test whatever it spits out.
    - 2y ago
Kye 2y ago
Spot on. I'm not A Programmer(TM), but I have dabbled in a lot of languages doing a lot of random things. Sometimes I have qwen2.5-coder:14b whip up a script to do some little thing where I don't want to spend a week doing remedial go/python just to get back to learning how to write boilerplate. All that experience means I can edit it easily enough because recognition kicks in and drags the memory kicking and screaming back into the front. I quickly discovered it was essentially defaulting to "absolute novice." No error handlers, no file/folder existence checking, etc. I had to learn to put all that into the prompt. >> "Write a python script to scrape all linked files of a certain file extension on a web page under the same domain as the page. Follow best practices. Handle errors, make strings OS-independent, etc. Be persnickety. Be pythonic." Here's the output: https://gist.github.com/kyefox/d42471893de670a2a4179482d3c8bf2e https://gist.github.com/kyefox/d42471893de670a2a4179482d3c8b... I'm far from an expert and my memory might be foggy, but that looks like a solid script. I can see someone with less practice doing battle with debuggers trying the first thing that comes out without all the extra prompting hitting errors and not having any clue. For example: I wrote a thing that pulled a bunch of JSON blobs from an API. Fixing the "out of handles" error is how I learned about file system and network default limits on open files and connections, and buffering. Hitting stuff like that over and over was educational and instilled good habits.
darkwater 2y ago
I think GP is basically saying the same as you.
sandruso 2y ago
100%. Learning is effort. Exercising is effort. Getting better at anything is effort. You simply can't skip the practice that's the reality. If you want to *learn* something from scratch AI will only help with answers but you still need to put the time in to understand it.
sshine 2y ago
I assume you disagree with there being such a thing as "responsible AI use", because besides that, I completely agree with everything you write, including my own experience of "spot wrong answers, but feel becoming lazy". So I suppose you think that becoming lazy is always irresponsible? It seems to me, then, that either the Amish are right, or there is a gray zone. Being a CS teacher, my use of "responsible AI use" probably comes from a place of need: If I can say there is responsible AI use, I can pull the brake maybe a little bit for learners. It seems like LLMs in all their versatility are a great disservice to students. I'm not convinced it's entirely bad, but it is overwhelmingly bad for weak learners.

0x1062 2y ago

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

GlacierFox 2y ago
The point he's making is, we still have to learn to use tools no? There still had to he some knowledge there or else you're just sat sifting through all the crap the AI spits out endlessly for the rest of your life. The op wrote his comment like it's a complete replacement rather than an enhancement.
saagarjha 2y ago
Tool use can make you lazy if you're not careful.
4ndr3vv 2y ago
You could similarly consider driving a car as "a tool that helps me get to X quicker". Now tell me cars don't make you lazy.
eviks 2y ago
It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
- logicchains 2y ago
  When you go for a job as a forklift operator, nobody asks you to demonstrate how you can manually carry a load of timber.
  - eviks 2y ago
    You forgot a second sentence that completes the logic chain. Yes, "some tools are useful for some work", so what? That wasn't the original claim...
    - logicchains 2y ago
      The claim was that it's lazy to use a tool as a substitute for learning how to do something yourself. But when the tool entirely obviates the need for doing the task yourself, you don't need to be able to do it yourself to do the job. It doesn't matter if a forklift driver isn't strong enough to manually carry a load, similarly once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced.
      - skissane 2y ago
        > once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced. Once AI is that good, the developer won't have a job any more.
        necovek 2y ago
        The whole question is if the AI will ever get that good? All evidence so far points to no (just like with every tool — farmers are still usually strong men even if they've got tractors that are thousands of times stronger than any human), but that still leaves a bunch of non-great programmers out of a job.
Matthyze 2y ago
Tools can be crutches — useful but ultimately inhibitory to developing advanced skill.
numpad0 2y ago
AI companies don't think so, is clearly the implication.
mathieuh 2y ago
I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it. Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so. Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer. I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before.
- necovek 2y ago
  I think you are both right. AI will let some people conquer skills otherwise out of their reach, with all the pros and cons of that. It is exactly like the example someone else brought up of not needing to know assembly anymore with higher level languages: true, but those who do know it and can internalize how the machines operate have an easier time when it comes to figuring out the real hard problems and bugs they might hit. Which means that you only need to learn machine language and assembly superficially, and you have a good chance of being a very good programmer. However, where I am unsure how the things will unfold is that humans are constantly coming up with different programming languages, frameworks, patterns, because none of the existing ones really fit their mental model or are too much to learn about. Which — to me at least — hints at what I've long claimed: programming is more art than science. With complex interactions between a gazillion of mildly incompatible systems, even more so. As such, for someone with strong fundamentals, AI tools never provided much of a boon to me (yet). Incidentally, neither did StackOverflow ever help me: I never found a problem that I struggled with that wasn't easily solved with reading the upstream docs or upstream code, and when neither was available or good enough, SO was mostly crickets too. These days, I rarely do "gruntwork" programming, and only get called in on really hard problems, so the question switches to: how will we train the next generation of software engineers who are going to be called in for those hard problems? Because let's admit it, even today, not everybody can handle them.
deleted 2y ago
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waste_monk 2y ago
Tool use is fine, when you have the education and experience to use the tools properly, and to troubleshoot and recover when things go wrong. The use of AI is not just a labour saving device, it allows the user to bypass thinking and learning. It robs the user of an opportunity to grow. If you don't have the experience to know better it may be able to masquerade as a teacher and a problem solver, but beyond a trivial level relying on it is actively harmful to one's education. At some point the user will encounter a problem that has no existing answer in the AI's training dataset, and come to realise they have no real foundation to rely on. Code generative AI, as it currently exists, is a poisoned chalice.
antihipocrat 2y ago
Using the wrong tool for the job required isn't lazy but it may be dangerous, inefficient and ultimately more expensive.
Fricken 2y ago
Tools help us to put layers of abstraction between us and our goals. when things become too abstracted we lose sight of what we're really doing or why. Tools allow us to feel smart and productive while acting stupidly, and against our best interests. So we get fascism and catastrophic climate change, stuff like that. Tools create dependencies. We can't imagine life without our tools. "We shape our tools and our tools in turn shape us" said Marshall McLuhan.
Ekaros 2y ago
For learning it can very well be. And also it really depends on the tool and task. Calculator is fine tool. But symbolic solver might be a few steps too far. If you don't already understand the process. And possibly the start and end points. Problem with AI is that it is often black box tool. And not even deterministic one.
- necovek 2y ago
  AI as applied today is pretty deterministic. It does get retrained and tuned often in most common applications like ChatGPT, but without any changes, you should expect a deterministic answer.
sarchertech 2y ago
Copying and pasting from stack overflow is a tool. It’s fine to do in some cases, but it certainly gets abused by lazy incurious people. Tool use in general certainly can be lazy. A car is a tool, but most people would call an able bodied person driving their car to the end of the driveway to get the mail lazy.

GlacierFox 2y ago

You perfectly encapsulated my view on this. I'm utterly bewildered with people who take the opposing position that AI is essentially a complete replacement for the human mind and you'd be stupid not to fully embrace it as your thought process.

deleted 2y ago
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noufalibrahim 2y ago

This is a straightforward position and it's the one I hold but I had to reply to thank you for stating it so succinctly.

risyachka 2y ago

Not lazy per se, but you stop thinking and start relying on AI to think for you. And you must use that brain muscles otherwise your skills became to degrade fast, like really fast. As long as you ask llm What - or high level How - you should be good. As soon as you ask for (more than trivial) code or solutions - you start losing your skill and value as a developer.

sho_hn 2y ago

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who was enjoying many of the obvious benefits - availability, tailoring information to his inquiry, etc. So we cut a deal: We'd use the same ChatGPT account and I could keep an eye on his interactions with the system, so I could help him when the AI went off the rails and was steering him into the wrong direction. He initially made fast progress on the project I was helping him with, and was able to put more working code in place than others in the same phase. But then he hit a plateau really hard soon after, because he was running into bugs and issues he couldn't get solutions from the AI for and he just wasn't able to connect the dots himself. He'd almost get there, but would sometimes forget to remove random single lines doing the wrong thing, etc. His mental map of the code was poor, because he hadn't written it himself in that oldschool "every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works and how it connects to problems you're solving. As a result he'd get frustrated and had bouts of absenteeism next, because there wasn't any string of rewards and little victories there but just listless poking in the mud. To his credit, he eventually realized leaning on ChatGPT was holding him back mentally and he tried to take things slower and go back to API docs and slowly building up his codebase by himself.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
> listless poking in the mud https://xkcd.com/1838/ https://xkcd.com/1838/
Shinchy 2y ago
'"every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works' I totally agree with this and I really like that way of wording it.
Eisenstein 2y ago
What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

raincole 2y ago

Use LLM. But do not let it be the sole source of your information for any particular field. I think it's one of the most important disciplines the younger generation - to be honest, all generations - will have to learn. I have a rule for myself as a non-native English speaker: Any day I ask LLMs to fix my English, I must read 10 pages from traditionally published books (preferably pre-2023). Just to prevent LLM from dominating my language comprehension.

sshine 2y ago
I use LLMs as a translation tool, and make sure to generate JSON flashcards. Sometimes it is more important to get a point across in another language than it is to learn that language. Computers being automatable, you can use it to create a backlog for when you skipped learning so that you can maintain some control of your habit of not learning what you're saying.

teekert 2y ago

Feeling "Lazy" is just an emotion, which to me has nothing to do with how productive you are as a human. In fact the people not feeling lazy but hyped are probably more effective and productive. You're just doing this to yourself because you have assumptions on how a productive/effective human should function. You could call it "stuck in the past". I have the idea that there are 2 kinds of people, those avidly against AI because it makes mistakes (it sure does) and makes one lazy and all other kinds of negative things, and those that experiment and find a place for it but aren't that vocal about it. Sure you can go too far, I've heard someone in Quality Control Proclaim "ChatGPT just knows everything, its saves me so much time!" To which I asked if they heart about hallucinations and they hadn't, they'd just been copying whatever it said into their reports. Which is certainly problematic.

lemagedurage 2y ago

I think the same kind of critical thinking that was required to reimplement and break algorithms must now be used to untangle AIs answers. In that way, it's a new skill, with its own muscle memory. Previously learnt skills like debugging segfaults slowly become less relevant.

Terr_ 2y ago

> LLMs just make you lazy. Yeah, and I'd like to emphasize that this is qualitatively different from older gripes such as "calculators make kids lazy in math." This is because LLMs' have an amazing ability to dream up responses stuffed with traditional signals of truthfulness, care, engagement, honesty etc... but that ability is not matched by their chances of dreaming up answers and ideas that are logically true. This gap is inevitable from their current design, and it means users are given signals that it's safe for their brains to think-less-hard (skepticism, critical analysis) about what's being returned at the same moments when they need to use their minds the most. That's new. A calculator doesn't flatter you or pretend to be a wise professor with a big vocabulary listening very closely to your problems.

reactordev 2y ago

Learning comes from focus and repetition. Talent comes from knowing which skill to use. Using AI effectively is a talent. Some of us embrace learning new skills while others hold onto the past. AI is here to stay, sorry. You can either learn to adapt to it or you can slowly die. The argument that AI is bad and anyone who uses it ends up in a tangled mess is only your perspective and your experience. I’m way more productive using AI to help me than I ever was before. Yes, I proofread the result. Yes, I can discern a good response from a bad one. AI isn’t a replacement for knowing how to code, but it can be an extremely valuable teacher to those orgs that lack proper training. Any company that has the position that AI is bad, and lacks proper training and incentives for those that want to learn new skills, isn’t a company I ever want to work for.

pinoy420 2y ago

You sound like the sort of person of old who “Why would you use the internet. Look in an encyclopaedia. ‘Google it’ is just lazy” This trope is unbecoming of anyone sensible.

Applejinx 2y ago
It's 2025, not 2015. 'google it and add the word reddit' is a thing. For now. Google 'reflections on trusting trust'. Your level of trust in software that purports to think for you out of a multi-gig stew of word associations is pretty intense, but I wouldn't call it pretty sensible.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  What on earth does that drivel even say. Did you generate this from a heavily quantised gpt2?
hollowturtle 2y ago
That's not what my comment implies. I'm just saying that relying solely on LLMs makes you lazy, like relying just on google/stackoverflow whatever, it doesn't shift you from a resource that can be layed off to a resource that can't. You must know your art, and use the tools wisely

elpocko 2y ago

Talent is innate. Proficiency requires practice.

blensor 2y ago

I can even feel it in my own coding. I've been coding almost my entire life all the way back to C64 Basic and ever since I am relying on Copilot for most of my regular work I can feel my non AI assisted coding skills get rusty. That's a scary thing

Narciss 2y ago

I hear this argument all the time, and I think “this is exactly how people who coded in assembly back in the day thought about those using higher level programming languages.” It is a paradigm shift, yes. And you will know less about the implementation at times, yes. But will you care when you can deploy things twice, three times, five times as fast as the person not using AI? No. And also, when you want to learn more about a specific bit of the AI written code, you can simply delve deep into it by asking the AI questions. The AI right now may not be perfect, so yes you still need to know how to code. But in 5 years from now? Chances are you will go in your favorite app builder, state what you want, tweak what you get and you will get the product that you want, with maybe one dev making sure every once in a while that you’re not messing things up - maybe. So will new devs need to know high level programming languages? Possibly, but maybe not.

hollowturtle 2y ago
You seem so strong opinionated and sure what the future holds for us, but I must remember you though, that in your example "from assembly to higher level programming languages" the demand for programmers didn't go down, went up, and as companies were able to develop more, more development and more investments were made, more challenges showed up, new jobs were invented and so on... You get where I'm going... The thing I'm questioning is how much lazy new technologies make you, many programmers even before LLMs had no idea how a computer works and only programmed in higher level languages, it was a disaster before with many people claming software was bad and industry going down a road where software quality matters less and less. Well that situation turbo boosted by an LLMs because "doesn't matter i can deploy 100x times a day" disrupting user experience imo won't led us far
sarchertech 2y ago
1. We still teach assembly to students. Having a mental model of what the computer is doing is incredibly helpful. Every good programmer has such a model in my experience. Some of them learned it by studying it explicitly, some picked it up more implicitly. But the former tends to be a whole lot faster without the stop on the way where you are floundering as a mid level with a horribly incorrect model for years (which I’ve seen many many times). 2. Compilers are deterministic. You can recompile the source code and get the same assembly a million times. You can also take a bit of assembly then look at the source code of the compiler and tell exactly where that assembly came from. And you can change the compiler to change that output. 3. Source code is written in a formal unambiguous language. I’m sure LLMs will be great at spitting out green field apps, but unless they evolve to honest to goodness AGI, this won’t get far beyond existing low code solutions. No one has solved or even proposed a solution for any of these issues beyond “the AI will advance sufficiently that humans won’t need to look at the code ever. They’ll never need to interact with it in any way other than through the AI”. But to get to that point will require AGI and the AI won’t need input from humans at all, it won’t need a manager telling it what to build.

eknkc 2y ago

I drove cars before the sat nav systems and when I visited somewhere, I'd learn how to drive to there. The second drive would be from memory. However, as soon as I started relying on sat navs, I became dependent on them. I can not drive to a lot of places that I visited more than once without a sat nav these days (and I'm getting older, that's a part of it too). I wonder if the same thing will happen with coding and LLMs.

dimitri-vs 2y ago
Progress is built on top of an infinite number of dependences. In many ways people that don't use sat nav are at a disadvantage: real time traffic and redirection, high precision ETA, trip logging, etc.
sshine 2y ago
On a roadtrip ten years back we chose to navigate by map and compass, and avoid highways. With sat nav I don't even try to read the exit signs; I just follow the blue line. It takes me 10-20 drives somewhere before I have the muscle memory, and I never made an active mental effort. Going somewhere by public transportation or foot, e.g. a large homogenic parking lot complex, I consciously make an effort to take mental pictures so I can backtrack or traverse perfectly the second time; in spite of that being mentally challenging, it's still the easiest way I have. I cannot assemble the hardware that I write code for. This is in spite of having access to both the soldering equipment, the parts and the colleagues who are willing to help me. At some point all skills become abstract; efficiency is traded for flexibility when you keep doing the same thing for a very long time. I can still drive a stick shift, but maybe not in 20 years.

jack_pp 2y ago

Let me give you an example from yesterday. I was learning tailwind and had a really long class attribute on a div which I didn't like. I wanted to split it and found a way to do it using my JavaScript framework (the new way to do it was suggested by deepseek). When I started writing by hand the list of classes in the new format copilot gave me an auto complete suggestion after I wrote the first class. I pressed tab and it was done. I showed this to my new colleague who is a bit older than me and sort of had similar attitudes as you. He told me he can do the same with some multi cursor shenanigans and I'll be honest in that I wasn't interested in his approach. Seems like he would've taken more time to solve the same problem even though he had superior technique than me. He said sure it takes longer but I need to verify by reading the whole class list and that's a pain but I just reloaded the page and it was fine. He still wasn't comfortable with me using copilot. So yes, it does make me lazier but you could say the same about using go instead of C or any higher level abstraction. These tools will only get better and more correct. It's our job to figure out where it is appropriate to use them and where it isn't. Going to either extremes is where the issue is

hollowturtle 2y ago
Remember though that lazyness, as I learned in computing, is kinda "doing something later": you might have pushed the change/fix faster than your senior fellow programmer, but you still need to review and test that change right? Maybe the change you're talking about was really trivial and you just needed to refresh your browser to see a trivial change, but when it's not, being lazy about a change will only gets you suffer more when reviewing a pr and testing the non trivial change working for thousands customers with different devices
- jack_pp 2y ago
  The problem is he wasn't comfortable with my solution even though it was clearly faster and it could be tested instantly. It's a mental block for him and a lot of people in this industry. I don't advocate blindly trusting LLMs. I don't either and of course test whatever it spits out.
  - 2y ago

Kye 2y ago

Spot on. I'm not A Programmer(TM), but I have dabbled in a lot of languages doing a lot of random things. Sometimes I have qwen2.5-coder:14b whip up a script to do some little thing where I don't want to spend a week doing remedial go/python just to get back to learning how to write boilerplate. All that experience means I can edit it easily enough because recognition kicks in and drags the memory kicking and screaming back into the front. I quickly discovered it was essentially defaulting to "absolute novice." No error handlers, no file/folder existence checking, etc. I had to learn to put all that into the prompt. >> "Write a python script to scrape all linked files of a certain file extension on a web page under the same domain as the page. Follow best practices. Handle errors, make strings OS-independent, etc. Be persnickety. Be pythonic." Here's the output: https://gist.github.com/kyefox/d42471893de670a2a4179482d3c8bf2e https://gist.github.com/kyefox/d42471893de670a2a4179482d3c8b... I'm far from an expert and my memory might be foggy, but that looks like a solid script. I can see someone with less practice doing battle with debuggers trying the first thing that comes out without all the extra prompting hitting errors and not having any clue. For example: I wrote a thing that pulled a bunch of JSON blobs from an API. Fixing the "out of handles" error is how I learned about file system and network default limits on open files and connections, and buffering. Hitting stuff like that over and over was educational and instilled good habits.

darkwater 2y ago

I think GP is basically saying the same as you.

sandruso 2y ago

100%. Learning is effort. Exercising is effort. Getting better at anything is effort. You simply can't skip the practice that's the reality. If you want to *learn* something from scratch AI will only help with answers but you still need to put the time in to understand it.

sshine 2y ago

I assume you disagree with there being such a thing as "responsible AI use", because besides that, I completely agree with everything you write, including my own experience of "spot wrong answers, but feel becoming lazy". So I suppose you think that becoming lazy is always irresponsible? It seems to me, then, that either the Amish are right, or there is a gray zone. Being a CS teacher, my use of "responsible AI use" probably comes from a place of need: If I can say there is responsible AI use, I can pull the brake maybe a little bit for learners. It seems like LLMs in all their versatility are a great disservice to students. I'm not convinced it's entirely bad, but it is overwhelmingly bad for weak learners.