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>Good enough that choosing to focus on the fundamentals seems rather foolish.[...]but most of the time it sticks the landing. At this point, learning Awk seems
by Barrin92 9mo ago
>Good enough that choosing to focus on the fundamentals seems rather foolish.[...]but most of the time it sticks the landing. At this point, learning Awk seems about as sane as mastering the loom
The joy aspect aside, if you're writing code professionally obviously that is no substitute for knowing how Awk works because you still need to make sure that what it produced is correct, because I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into production, in particular not a piece of code some tool got wrong for 20 minutes, without understanding what it does.
If that were an intern rather than a machine and you as the programmer don't know how the code works you're not doing your job. AI systems have not freed people from acquiring "arcane knowledge" it makes that knowledge more important than ever, the only thing it does is type faster than you do.
- monooso 9mo agoAuthor here... > I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into production... without understanding what it does. I do not. That hasn't changed. > ...the only thing it does is type faster than you do. LLMs can do many, many things that I cannot. Their breadth of knowledge dwarfs mine.
- cudgy 9mo agoHow do you verify that the output is correct for these areas that the LLM dwarfs your knowledge?
- monooso 9mo agoIf it's throwaway code to accomplish a one-off task, I just care about whether the task has been accomplished. The method is largely irrelevant. Anything more "serious" (client work, for example) usually falls within my sphere of knowledge, at least to the point where I can accurately review the LLM's solution. My long-standing habit of practising TDD also helps.
- cudgy 9mo agoI was addressing the areas of which you are lacking knowledge.