4 ms·

We gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 202

by larodi 1mo ago

We gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 2026 though, I see very little reason to continue to do so. What am I going to teach them? How to run Codex or CC? Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? We have always considered ourselves forward-thinking with live coding, paired programming, AI-assisted visual artefacts. And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided we stop giving these lectures. Everyone autodidact themselves, I dont care anymore.

embedding-shape 1mo ago
> And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?". I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff. I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)
- whizzter 1mo ago
  > Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Not often my real-life experience pretty much differs 180 with what I read here, but this is one of those cases. > the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something Yeah, this is like 50% of all the developers in the software engineering ecosystem, if not more. We're all riding the highs of past successes then extrapolate that over our entire lives and future work.
    - bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
      >Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Assuming these behaviors often come from a place of insecurity then I think the normal behavior of programmers may be modified in the case they are in a university class trying to learn from a teacher, because then the programmer's natural fear of saying something and being shown to be an idiot will keep them quiet unless they are very very sure.
    - tdeck 1mo ago
      > Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? I was a TA the whole time I was in university, for computer science and computer engineering classes. I don't remember any of my students being an asshole even once, and I think this is the kind of thing I (unfortunately) would remember.
- larodi 1mo ago
  > Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? well, in 2025, not sure if related to agentic dev, but very likely, there is a very well felt drop in attention. also we figured there is a massive misproportion between people who have already used GPTs alongside classic dev, and those who have adopted or been exposed to agentic dev. my surprise is that these people, being 3rd and 4th graders, were not equally exposed to harness-based dev, even though most are already employed on certain roles in actual companies. > started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, well I agree this is important, but it is not a class in JS anymore. told the faculty staff we need to reinvent the program, and they are not even aware yet how damaging this impact is. in all honesty - nobody knows at present moment what skills are needed to teach to people. besides, with LLMs, everyone curious enough can teach themselves. so this changes massively the whole idea of knowledge transfer done by humans, does it not? we should teach other skills, not the technical trivia. i can give many examples, but this is going to eventually become very long post. ... to add injury to insult, one of the team members invested early on in a 512GB mac studio, put some harness with Qwen on it and is currently collecting trading signals and doing finance. he expressed doubt there's more to do for him in the area, and he was perhaps one of the top notch ES6 devs I've ever known, with vast experience in UI and a long list of contracts (many of them got cancelled recently)! So while many complain about their job security (due to AI), I can tell you the whole academia is nosing down rapidly. add to this the fact that most compute is concentrated in private enterprises - same entities that slurp my students afterwards and never say thanks.
  - matroxmemories 1mo ago
    If you were just teaching technical trivia, I would have considered that teacher a bad teacher even in the 90s.
herbst 1mo ago
The issue is that AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well on any kind of device, for blind people or otherwise impaired, color blind, ... However it's not that anyone cared before otherwise AI would know better than that
- larodi 1mo ago
  Well AI does whatever is told. or rather - expounds as per what the anchor (the prompt) started the generation. That is all - it doesn't do more. It has biases because of RLHF and other post-training, but not innate AI-bias. It's like... whatever you put in the archive will later on expound. But that's not the point realy. The question is what is that we going to command the LLM do, how complete this requirement will be. But hold on - writing JS is not doing UX, and is not doing business analysis - definitely not the same thing. JS is a general purpose language with fair amount of functional and declarative stuff in it, heavily influenced by Perl and LISP. So why would a person who's not inclined to dive in this matter (typically very hard stuff) would want to learn it, instead of spending a day out in the sun before the world ends? Well she did so (back in the day) mostly because there was a market demand for such skills. And then we have autodidacts who don't need this type of education (not schooling!), and those that are not. The latter still want to take good salary and perhaps they can be trained into it. So, in essense, many people learned JS because there was a demand, and my prognosis is this demand for people writing JS goes down, not because the demand goes away, but because we won't be needing most of the JS code and perhaps also we won't be needimng UIs very soon (not in the same way we did before). And, just imagine, if one's aware of first principles in programming, they can easily command the LLM/harness to create a perfectly working Swift code. Saying it because is exactly what myself did, even though this is remotely a language I am good at. Perhaps the amount of effort to get these libs right would've otherwise costed in the hundreds of thousands, now it costs 200$ a month for Fable/GPT6 and not-so-much-of-an-actual-understanding on my side, but a steady pace to keep the harness follow the road intended. Why would then anyone want to learn JS, save for the fun of it?
- dormento 1mo ago
  > ...AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well... The world has spoken, and it does not want "good". It just wants "good enough". The "idea-guy" got 100-fold more dangerous.
segfaultex 1mo ago
>Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? I would have loved this in college. I know most don't, but I think we'll hit a point where the people who don't know enough to assess when model output is sub-par will fall by the wayside. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I won't be included in this blast radius, so I try to dig as deeply as I can whenever possible (and where it makes sense,IE: I couldn't tell you all of the details of LLVM or hypervisor internals)
archagon 1mo ago
Unless this is the endpoint of software engineering (React for the next thousand years?) someone’s gonna have to do the work of understanding and pushing things forward. It won’t be an agent.
- tayo42 1mo ago
  Have there's been interesting developments since ai coding got popular?
belmarca 1mo ago
I would pay for such content. Do you have course notes? Have you written a book? I'd pay to get expert knowledge from... an expert! LLMs are fine, but still not replacing actual human experts IME.
- larodi 1mo ago
  Here the notes and materials from stuff written during the two classes - Advanced JS and JS frameworks https://github.com/FMIjs https://github.com/FMIjs You can tell the year of distinct repos. There are no slides as we adopted the mathematical approach of writing live and solving as we progress in order to demonstrate the thought process. This is not a complete snapshot of all discussed in the classes, but is a comprehensive history of what I claim we did. There is still a chance we give it one more time in 2026/2027. At least one team member already dropped out, perhaps a second also. I’m considering with the other leading person whether to continue. Thanks for the feedback.

by larodi 1mo ago

embedding-shape 1mo ago

> And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?". I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff. I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)

whizzter 1mo ago
> Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Not often my real-life experience pretty much differs 180 with what I read here, but this is one of those cases. > the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something Yeah, this is like 50% of all the developers in the software engineering ecosystem, if not more. We're all riding the highs of past successes then extrapolate that over our entire lives and future work.
  - bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
    >Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Assuming these behaviors often come from a place of insecurity then I think the normal behavior of programmers may be modified in the case they are in a university class trying to learn from a teacher, because then the programmer's natural fear of saying something and being shown to be an idiot will keep them quiet unless they are very very sure.
  - tdeck 1mo ago
    > Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? I was a TA the whole time I was in university, for computer science and computer engineering classes. I don't remember any of my students being an asshole even once, and I think this is the kind of thing I (unfortunately) would remember.
larodi 1mo ago
> Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? well, in 2025, not sure if related to agentic dev, but very likely, there is a very well felt drop in attention. also we figured there is a massive misproportion between people who have already used GPTs alongside classic dev, and those who have adopted or been exposed to agentic dev. my surprise is that these people, being 3rd and 4th graders, were not equally exposed to harness-based dev, even though most are already employed on certain roles in actual companies. > started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, well I agree this is important, but it is not a class in JS anymore. told the faculty staff we need to reinvent the program, and they are not even aware yet how damaging this impact is. in all honesty - nobody knows at present moment what skills are needed to teach to people. besides, with LLMs, everyone curious enough can teach themselves. so this changes massively the whole idea of knowledge transfer done by humans, does it not? we should teach other skills, not the technical trivia. i can give many examples, but this is going to eventually become very long post. ... to add injury to insult, one of the team members invested early on in a 512GB mac studio, put some harness with Qwen on it and is currently collecting trading signals and doing finance. he expressed doubt there's more to do for him in the area, and he was perhaps one of the top notch ES6 devs I've ever known, with vast experience in UI and a long list of contracts (many of them got cancelled recently)! So while many complain about their job security (due to AI), I can tell you the whole academia is nosing down rapidly. add to this the fact that most compute is concentrated in private enterprises - same entities that slurp my students afterwards and never say thanks.
- matroxmemories 1mo ago
  If you were just teaching technical trivia, I would have considered that teacher a bad teacher even in the 90s.

herbst 1mo ago

The issue is that AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well on any kind of device, for blind people or otherwise impaired, color blind, ... However it's not that anyone cared before otherwise AI would know better than that

larodi 1mo ago
Well AI does whatever is told. or rather - expounds as per what the anchor (the prompt) started the generation. That is all - it doesn't do more. It has biases because of RLHF and other post-training, but not innate AI-bias. It's like... whatever you put in the archive will later on expound. But that's not the point realy. The question is what is that we going to command the LLM do, how complete this requirement will be. But hold on - writing JS is not doing UX, and is not doing business analysis - definitely not the same thing. JS is a general purpose language with fair amount of functional and declarative stuff in it, heavily influenced by Perl and LISP. So why would a person who's not inclined to dive in this matter (typically very hard stuff) would want to learn it, instead of spending a day out in the sun before the world ends? Well she did so (back in the day) mostly because there was a market demand for such skills. And then we have autodidacts who don't need this type of education (not schooling!), and those that are not. The latter still want to take good salary and perhaps they can be trained into it. So, in essense, many people learned JS because there was a demand, and my prognosis is this demand for people writing JS goes down, not because the demand goes away, but because we won't be needing most of the JS code and perhaps also we won't be needimng UIs very soon (not in the same way we did before). And, just imagine, if one's aware of first principles in programming, they can easily command the LLM/harness to create a perfectly working Swift code. Saying it because is exactly what myself did, even though this is remotely a language I am good at. Perhaps the amount of effort to get these libs right would've otherwise costed in the hundreds of thousands, now it costs 200$ a month for Fable/GPT6 and not-so-much-of-an-actual-understanding on my side, but a steady pace to keep the harness follow the road intended. Why would then anyone want to learn JS, save for the fun of it?
dormento 1mo ago
> ...AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well... The world has spoken, and it does not want "good". It just wants "good enough". The "idea-guy" got 100-fold more dangerous.

segfaultex 1mo ago

>Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? I would have loved this in college. I know most don't, but I think we'll hit a point where the people who don't know enough to assess when model output is sub-par will fall by the wayside. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I won't be included in this blast radius, so I try to dig as deeply as I can whenever possible (and where it makes sense,IE: I couldn't tell you all of the details of LLVM or hypervisor internals)

archagon 1mo ago

Unless this is the endpoint of software engineering (React for the next thousand years?) someone’s gonna have to do the work of understanding and pushing things forward. It won’t be an agent.

tayo42 1mo ago
Have there's been interesting developments since ai coding got popular?

belmarca 1mo ago

I would pay for such content. Do you have course notes? Have you written a book? I'd pay to get expert knowledge from... an expert! LLMs are fine, but still not replacing actual human experts IME.

larodi 1mo ago
Here the notes and materials from stuff written during the two classes - Advanced JS and JS frameworks https://github.com/FMIjs https://github.com/FMIjs You can tell the year of distinct repos. There are no slides as we adopted the mathematical approach of writing live and solving as we progress in order to demonstrate the thought process. This is not a complete snapshot of all discussed in the classes, but is a comprehensive history of what I claim we did. There is still a chance we give it one more time in 2026/2027. At least one team member already dropped out, perhaps a second also. I’m considering with the other leading person whether to continue. Thanks for the feedback.