6 ms·

At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of cours

At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken. Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it. Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.

wkjagt 1mo ago
I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
- echelon 1mo ago
  I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc). With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month. I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time. I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods. I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done. 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie. I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
  - brookst 1mo ago
    Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
    - Jcampuzano2 1mo ago
      Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter. With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that. We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator. AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it. In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
      - brookst 1mo ago
        I appreciate your reply and framing, but it strikes me as a spirited opposition to delegation. Or at least a strong assertion that AI use is similar to managing an organization. The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
    - claytongulick 1mo ago
      > Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox? Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother? I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place. Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning. When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement. What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement? A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK. What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down- - Widget sales report Why? - To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing Why? - So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way? Why? - So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society Why? - So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit Etc... OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals? The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people. When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
- tempest_ 1mo ago
  Difference between taking your own notes and skimming someone else's. I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
  - brookst 1mo ago
    It’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I’ve tackled projects at scales I could never have done before, and learned more than I would have. My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.
    - hello_moto 1mo ago
      Will that knowledge stick? Given that you blasted through many things relatively quick?
      - dalmo3 1mo ago
        As someone in a similar journey, I say: No, the knowledge won't stick. OTOH, the output might stick? Then the question becomes do you value knowledge for its own sake or for what it enables you to do? I don't have an answer.
        brookst 1mo ago
        What an insightful response. I thought about that for a while, and its a great way to reframe some of this debate about the desirability of using AI.
      - brookst 1mo ago
        I’ve never been a cram for the test kind of person. I do best when using knowledge in an ongoing basis. Regardless of AI, things I studied intensely a decade ago but never use are by and large gone, whereas things I use frequently stay and deepen. I don’t expect it to be any different with AI, but YMMV.
- yoyohello13 1mo ago
  There was a well known phenomenon people called ‘tutorial hell’ where when learning to program you could understand all the code from tutorials, but when it came time to actually create your own solutions for stuff you got stuck. I think AI is basically enabling eternal tutorial hell, you never actually need to break out of it anymore.
  - nunez 1mo ago
    Same thing happens when you're learning a (human) language.
    - yoyohello13 1mo ago
      Yeah it shows up in all learning really. Putting theory in to practice is a crucial component of learning.
  - Mabusto 1mo ago
    This has happened to me with Rust. I read the book, did the interactive tutorials and then started on a small project and couldn’t really code anything! This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something. AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement. I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
  - DrewADesign 1mo ago
    The common denominator is cargo cultism. AI coding is really just trying to make cargo cult coding sustainable.
dom96 1mo ago
I've been doing this on my latest personal project. What I've realised I missed the most is feeling in the zone or in a "flow" state as some call it. It really feels amazing. Coding agents take that away from you. I really think we need some coding agent implementation which takes less agency away from programmers and helps people be in the flow even more. For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect. Quick answers to be reminded about syntax, and to get help when stuck. It actually enhances the flow state. Plus it's all free.
- KingOfMyRoom 1mo ago
  What do you use to be in the zone? music in the background? What type? Or silence or something else?
  - nunez 1mo ago
    Good music, a good beverage and loads upon loads upon loads of free time.
  - noduerme 1mo ago
    I don't think it has to do with sound. Some sounds can disrupt it, of course. I can work well in a noisy cafe as long as I'm not listening to any particular conversation. Although oftentimes, if I'm alone, I talk to myself out loud while I'm coding ("no, not that, it should go here... where's that header? stupid typo...") We used to call it "seeing through the code". The moment when you're no longer looking at text on a page, you're seeing what it does as you scroll through it. What you need most, to get to that place, is to simply spend a lot of time writing and reading code until it becomes second nature. Something like 10,000 hours. Once you've done that, reading an LLM's code is trivial. But letting it write most of the code, without reviewing it line by line, causes rapid brain atrophy. Because to really be in the zone, you need to keep everything relevant in your head. Which means it has to be in there in the first place.
    - KingOfMyRoom 1mo ago
      That makes sense. I wonder how much the sound itself matters versus it simply becoming part of the ritual that tells your brain "now we’re working" I used to listen to classical music, rap or hip hop, but lately I’ve moved toward those long focus playlists on YouTube and things like Brain.fm. They seem to help me, so I was curious whether other people deliberately use something to get into that state or whether it just happens through the work itself.
praveer13 1mo ago
For my personal “project” I’ve been using chatgpt to teach me from math (linear algebra) to quantum computing - asked it to create a big list of prompts optimal for single threads, for me to learn with Socratic method. I plan to write my notes as a blog for each thread in my own words. I think this is a good use of AI for personal goals, it’s the best learning experience for me so far. I’ve never been able to focus on lecture videos
ropbear 1mo ago
In my experience, students were actually pretty good about understanding this for themselves, at least in a security course I ran a survey in[0]. Unfortunately I didn’t get a statistically significant sample size (10/~60). Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result. [0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused-ctfs-are-facing-a-restructure https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...
jckrichabdkejdb 1mo ago
[dead]
ajasmin 1mo ago
Sure. No AI for toy projects:. But the professional mission-critical ones, you should just let the LLM write them
ynac 1mo ago
That reminds me of "coding" in my Roaring Spring No.20165. Which is to say, my notebook. It was great for when I didn't have access to a computer. I remember the feeling of how cool it looked along side cartoons of monsters and cars crashing into the paper's edge.
LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
After many decades of coding, probably 1M+ LOC*, for real, I am purposely doing most of my work through coding agents to understand their capabilities. No stupid demand that I take a day off from AI is remotely helpful here. But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so: 1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products. 2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs. 3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother. 4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that. 5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse. I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks. *No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird growing up with the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?
lijok 1mo ago
If you’re not learning with AI in play, you sure as sunshine wont be learning anything without AI It’s when we put arbitrarily impossible deadlines that AI users learn nothing
- caconym_ 1mo ago
  I don't think this is true at all. If you don't have AI then either you build what you need to build and learn how to do it along the way, or you build nothing and learn nothing. There is no option to build something but learn nothing, but that's the default outcome with AI. To learn how to build something AI built for you, you need to build it again on your own, which I dare say very few AI users are doing for nontrivial projects.
roosterIllusi0n 1mo ago
Universities are the type of place you would automatically expect to teach the fundamentals. They do it in every other subject. You should have "coding like a caveman" back to back with "coding like a spaceman". You can make the hand coded class have two 1.5hr in-person labs each week. With an AI class along side of it. Don't wait on either skill, both need to start freshman year. First year AI is teach assistive coding using llms with open source models. Setup a workbench llm for each student to have with an openweight model on it. Teach different ways of getting good results and go over setting up the whole environment yourself. The next year do a 4hr lab in a lab room with office chairs, variable height desks, and model it off an open office. No special dress code, but name tags and people will talk to each other with the openness of dialog at a good workplace. This even gives the TA usable experience. You could introduce different structures with leads or co-equals or any useful team structure. People need to be taught in-person working skills because companies don't want to hire people without experience. This also helps someone be able to interview for a work from home job.

wkjagt 1mo ago

I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.

echelon 1mo ago
I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc). With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month. I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time. I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods. I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done. 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie. I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
- brookst 1mo ago
  Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
  - Jcampuzano2 1mo ago
    Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter. With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that. We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator. AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it. In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
    - brookst 1mo ago
      I appreciate your reply and framing, but it strikes me as a spirited opposition to delegation. Or at least a strong assertion that AI use is similar to managing an organization. The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
  - claytongulick 1mo ago
    > Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators. Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox? Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother? I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place. Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning. When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement. What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement? A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK. What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down- - Widget sales report Why? - To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing Why? - So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way? Why? - So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society Why? - So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit Etc... OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals? The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people. When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
tempest_ 1mo ago
Difference between taking your own notes and skimming someone else's. I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
- brookst 1mo ago
  It’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I’ve tackled projects at scales I could never have done before, and learned more than I would have. My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.
  - hello_moto 1mo ago
    Will that knowledge stick? Given that you blasted through many things relatively quick?
    - dalmo3 1mo ago
      As someone in a similar journey, I say: No, the knowledge won't stick. OTOH, the output might stick? Then the question becomes do you value knowledge for its own sake or for what it enables you to do? I don't have an answer.
      - brookst 1mo ago
        What an insightful response. I thought about that for a while, and its a great way to reframe some of this debate about the desirability of using AI.
    - brookst 1mo ago
      I’ve never been a cram for the test kind of person. I do best when using knowledge in an ongoing basis. Regardless of AI, things I studied intensely a decade ago but never use are by and large gone, whereas things I use frequently stay and deepen. I don’t expect it to be any different with AI, but YMMV.
yoyohello13 1mo ago
There was a well known phenomenon people called ‘tutorial hell’ where when learning to program you could understand all the code from tutorials, but when it came time to actually create your own solutions for stuff you got stuck. I think AI is basically enabling eternal tutorial hell, you never actually need to break out of it anymore.
- nunez 1mo ago
  Same thing happens when you're learning a (human) language.
  - yoyohello13 1mo ago
    Yeah it shows up in all learning really. Putting theory in to practice is a crucial component of learning.
- Mabusto 1mo ago
  This has happened to me with Rust. I read the book, did the interactive tutorials and then started on a small project and couldn’t really code anything! This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something. AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement. I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
- DrewADesign 1mo ago
  The common denominator is cargo cultism. AI coding is really just trying to make cargo cult coding sustainable.

dom96 1mo ago

I've been doing this on my latest personal project. What I've realised I missed the most is feeling in the zone or in a "flow" state as some call it. It really feels amazing. Coding agents take that away from you. I really think we need some coding agent implementation which takes less agency away from programmers and helps people be in the flow even more. For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect. Quick answers to be reminded about syntax, and to get help when stuck. It actually enhances the flow state. Plus it's all free.

KingOfMyRoom 1mo ago
What do you use to be in the zone? music in the background? What type? Or silence or something else?
- nunez 1mo ago
  Good music, a good beverage and loads upon loads upon loads of free time.
- noduerme 1mo ago
  I don't think it has to do with sound. Some sounds can disrupt it, of course. I can work well in a noisy cafe as long as I'm not listening to any particular conversation. Although oftentimes, if I'm alone, I talk to myself out loud while I'm coding ("no, not that, it should go here... where's that header? stupid typo...") We used to call it "seeing through the code". The moment when you're no longer looking at text on a page, you're seeing what it does as you scroll through it. What you need most, to get to that place, is to simply spend a lot of time writing and reading code until it becomes second nature. Something like 10,000 hours. Once you've done that, reading an LLM's code is trivial. But letting it write most of the code, without reviewing it line by line, causes rapid brain atrophy. Because to really be in the zone, you need to keep everything relevant in your head. Which means it has to be in there in the first place.
  - KingOfMyRoom 1mo ago
    That makes sense. I wonder how much the sound itself matters versus it simply becoming part of the ritual that tells your brain "now we’re working" I used to listen to classical music, rap or hip hop, but lately I’ve moved toward those long focus playlists on YouTube and things like Brain.fm. They seem to help me, so I was curious whether other people deliberately use something to get into that state or whether it just happens through the work itself.

praveer13 1mo ago

For my personal “project” I’ve been using chatgpt to teach me from math (linear algebra) to quantum computing - asked it to create a big list of prompts optimal for single threads, for me to learn with Socratic method. I plan to write my notes as a blog for each thread in my own words. I think this is a good use of AI for personal goals, it’s the best learning experience for me so far. I’ve never been able to focus on lecture videos

ropbear 1mo ago

In my experience, students were actually pretty good about understanding this for themselves, at least in a security course I ran a survey in[0]. Unfortunately I didn’t get a statistically significant sample size (10/~60). Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result. [0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused-ctfs-are-facing-a-restructure https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...

jckrichabdkejdb 1mo ago

[dead]

ajasmin 1mo ago

Sure. No AI for toy projects:. But the professional mission-critical ones, you should just let the LLM write them

ynac 1mo ago

That reminds me of "coding" in my Roaring Spring No.20165. Which is to say, my notebook. It was great for when I didn't have access to a computer. I remember the feeling of how cool it looked along side cartoons of monsters and cars crashing into the paper's edge.

LogicFailsMe 1mo ago

After many decades of coding, probably 1M+ LOC*, for real, I am purposely doing most of my work through coding agents to understand their capabilities. No stupid demand that I take a day off from AI is remotely helpful here. But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so: 1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products. 2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs. 3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother. 4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that. 5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse. I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks. *No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird growing up with the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?

lijok 1mo ago

If you’re not learning with AI in play, you sure as sunshine wont be learning anything without AI It’s when we put arbitrarily impossible deadlines that AI users learn nothing

caconym_ 1mo ago
I don't think this is true at all. If you don't have AI then either you build what you need to build and learn how to do it along the way, or you build nothing and learn nothing. There is no option to build something but learn nothing, but that's the default outcome with AI. To learn how to build something AI built for you, you need to build it again on your own, which I dare say very few AI users are doing for nontrivial projects.

roosterIllusi0n 1mo ago

Universities are the type of place you would automatically expect to teach the fundamentals. They do it in every other subject. You should have "coding like a caveman" back to back with "coding like a spaceman". You can make the hand coded class have two 1.5hr in-person labs each week. With an AI class along side of it. Don't wait on either skill, both need to start freshman year. First year AI is teach assistive coding using llms with open source models. Setup a workbench llm for each student to have with an openweight model on it. Teach different ways of getting good results and go over setting up the whole environment yourself. The next year do a 4hr lab in a lab room with office chairs, variable height desks, and model it off an open office. No special dress code, but name tags and people will talk to each other with the openness of dialog at a good workplace. This even gives the TA usable experience. You could introduce different structures with leads or co-equals or any useful team structure. People need to be taught in-person working skills because companies don't want to hire people without experience. This also helps someone be able to interview for a work from home job.