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I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of d
by diggan 2y ago
I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher.
If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
- n4r9 2y ago> would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? Would even that have some downsides in the long-term, since the process of banging one's head could be crucial to rewiring your brain to understand new concepts.
- diggan 2y agoYeah, I'm guessing that most of my valuable knowledge comes from sessions like this, where something is hard, and eventually you solve it. If I was in the same situation today, I'd probably keep throwing stuff at the LLM until it got it right, and not really learn anything. But then on the other hand, the point was never to learn, but to create. I'm still not sure if I'd be better or worse at actually creating things if I had LLMs in the beginning or not.
- Arisaka1 2y agoI think the argument made is, if there's no added value by understanding something deeper when it will inevitably do better than now, the only reason to dig deeper is for one's curiosity. All that digging now translates to expertise that is critical and potentially lucrative. But if it's only going to get better then for how long will this be true?
- eMPee584 2y ago> all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? thanks for this lil' dose of copium, so at least it qualifies as character buildup what a relief
- lurk2 2y ago> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow. The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
- noisy_boy 2y agoIts like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".
- randomopining 2y agoAI is just another abstraction. It's not like a senior Java dev can implement LocalDate.now() or CompletableFuture.await()