[HN Gopher] I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code
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I'm glad AI didn't exist when I learned to code
Author : sxhivs
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-02-18 13:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.shivs.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.shivs.me)
| casey2 wrote:
| If you learn to program before learning to code then with AI you
| will never have to learn to code.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm glad I got my degree before AI came and cheapened them all.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I think this really isn't about AI, but rather about the good
| self discipline as well as the willingness and perseverance to
| explore deeply.
|
| I have seen people who learned to code before AI, and yet because
| they don't bother to ask themselves another layer of "why" they
| continue to have a superficial understanding of everything. And I
| have no doubt that the truly excellent programmer will understand
| the whole system even if they learned coding after AI.
|
| > I had the habit of not copying code from YouTube tutorials
|
| This is what makes all the difference. If you know you should not
| blindly copy code from YouTube tutorials, you also know you
| should not copy code from AI output, and if you were to be born
| in my generation you would also know you should not copy code
| blindly from a textbook.
|
| Kudos to the author though--I think this person has the right
| personality to become a good programmer regardless of whether
| they wrote their first line of code before or after the age of
| LLMs.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yes, and the persistence to figure things out when they're not
| working the way you think they should. So many people just go
| and ask for help the moment things aren't working and if they
| still can't get an answer they just give up. It doesn't matter
| if you're coming to me or ChatGPT, if I just tell you what's
| wrong you never learn.
| xrd wrote:
| Hallucinating has always been of my favorite things to do, and I
| don't need an LLM to help with it.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| I mentor a few recent grads and folks who change careers into
| tech, so I'll share here what I've told them for years.
|
| Writing code is the _easiest_ part of software engineering. You
| 're hired for your perceived ability to solve problems the
| employer needs solved. Many times you'll solve it with code.
| Sometimes you'll solve it with process. In every instance, you're
| expected to solve it using your learned experience and ability to
| critically think through the constraints (time, money, etc.).
|
| If you can't be bothered to deal with the easiest part of your
| job, writing some code, how do you expect to be trusted with the
| hard stuff? I'm not saying don't use AI tooling, but I am saying
| don't cheat yourself by becoming dependent on it.
| svachalek wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better. Unfortunately people who should
| know better like Zuckerberg are perpetuating the idea that
| coding is the whole job.
| light_triad wrote:
| Partly because coding has become so hyper specialised in
| large companies, partly because folks who sell AI have an
| incentive to exaggerate to sell more.
|
| Programming is over, jobs will disappear and we'll all be on
| UBI while AI turns into terminator. Meanwhile designing
| software systems still requires lots of intrinsic motivation
| and persistence
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If you can 't be bothered to deal with the easiest part of
| your job, writing some code, how do you expect to be trusted
| with the hard stuff?_
|
| If writing code is the easiest and least impactful thing you do
| as a software engineer, why does it matter if you use AI to
| assist with that part? Or to come at it from another angle, why
| is using Stack Overflow/Google in the hunt for answers and
| examples good, but using AI models is not good?
| jpollock wrote:
| There is a lot of knowledge that devs gain by seeing how
| their code evolves over time.
|
| Things like "This encourages people to add features here,
| here and here".
|
| Without that experience, the code becomes inscrutable very
| quickly.
| globular-toast wrote:
| There's also the "big picture" part of software engineering,
| that is the architecture and design of a piece of software.
| It's all done in the head (and maybe on paper). Once my fingers
| hit the keyboard the code pretty much writes itself because the
| hard part has already been done.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'm glad google didn't exist when I learned to code.
| abraae wrote:
| When I started at Oracle way back in the day, there was no
| Google.
|
| I was charged with building a DSL so that users could specify
| their own business logic and tax rules.
|
| I spent 5 x 16 hour days in a flow state coding in C and
| emerged with a parser that worked remarkably well, but was
| hideously slow.
|
| After sharing the results with colleagues, one of them told me
| about lex and yacc. I rewrote it and it went from thousands of
| lines of code to a couple of configuration files and ran
| probably 1000x times as fast.
|
| Of course if search engines had been around then I could have
| skipped all those hard steps and that project would have been
| completed more quickly.
|
| But the skills and confidence I got from first doing it the
| hard way really helped in my career.
| johnea wrote:
| Me Too! and I was a high schooler in the 1970s...
|
| Since I'm close enough to end of career to be able to ignore the
| whole trend as a developer, I'm mostly dreading having to "talk"
| to some frikin bot everytime I need support on some product.
|
| If you agree that "customer support" system hell is bad already,
| then you have to know that this is all on the verge of being much
| worse...
|
| me: My payment keeps being rejected on a known good card...
|
| bot: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...
| triyambakam wrote:
| I don't see it as very different than humans who must follow a
| narrow script. And scaling support is a good thing. And then
| there's still prompt injection in lieu of social engineering
| pier25 wrote:
| The problem is that people are using AI to avoid learning to
| code.
| rock_artist wrote:
| It's exactly like learning math before or after calculators were
| tiny and portable.
|
| My son do basic calculations all the time. I know of some school
| aged kids doing amazing things. As long as you use technology to
| enhance and enrich you it's good. But concise is the key.
|
| You can try learning guitar only from YouTube. It might work, but
| you might also position your hand wrong and injure it. So balance
| and additional guidance are important.
| Sincere6066 wrote:
| I wish AI didn't exist so I could be glad.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| I'm glad I became a programmer before anyone became a coder.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I mentor a high school robotics team and they use copilot for
| Java coding and on occasion I've seen them write code that just
| kinda breaks the robot and then they're totally lost for a while.
|
| But I can assure you, the alternative is there being no coding
| team and maybe no robotics team at all.
|
| I think that maybe I'd say: it's good that AI isn't good enough
| to never break the robot. That's when they're learning a lot
| about coding and debugging.
| mikeocool wrote:
| One key thing that I found when learning to code mostly from
| actual books and online tutorials (well before AI), was to always
| re-type the code examples by hand instead of just reading them or
| copy-pasting them. If just reading the code is always miss a
| bunch of details, that id see when retyping.
|
| I tend to do the same thing when using AI to explore something at
| edge of my knowledge, where I don't know exactly what I just
| asked the AI to code. I ask it how to solve a general problem of
| the class I'm trying to solve, and the retype that code as I'm
| fitting it into my specific use case. I find that helps me much
| better understand what the AI generated code is doing, which
| comes in handy when it doesn't work as described or goes wrong.
| gamedever wrote:
| Is this different than "I'm glad calculators didn't exist when I
| learned math"?
|
| I'm mixed. I did try to get gemini to figure out how to do some
| fancy TypeScript stuff. It provided solutions but failed to meet
| the constraints and couldn't get it to really get what I meant.
| It would say "Oh, sorry, here's one dealing with that" and then
| spit out code that either still had the same problem or ignored a
| previous constraint.
|
| Anyway, more relevant, I did wonder if I wasn't trying enough on
| my own to figure out what I was trying to do. I failed either way
| haha.
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