Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

_Kinda sorta?_

There's actually two things going on when I'm coding at work:

1) I'm writing the business code my company needs to enable a feature/fix a bug/etc. 2) I'm getting better as a programmer and as someone who understands our system, so that #1 happens faster and is more reliable next time.

Using AI codegen can (arguably, the jury is still out on this if we include total costs, not just the costs of this one PR) help with #1. But it _appreciably bad_ at #2.

In fact, the closest parallel for #2 I can think of us plagiarism in an academic setting. You didn't do the work, which means you didn't actually learn the material, which means this isn't actually progress (assuming we continue to value #2, and, again, arguably #1 as well), it is just a problem in disguise.

It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress

> that’s progress, not a problem.

Agreed. Most of us aren’t washing our clothes with a washboard, yet the washboard not long ago was a timesaver. Technology evolves.

Now, if AI rises up against the government and Cursor becomes outlawed, then maybe your leet coder skills will matter again.

But when a catastrophic solar storm takes out the grid, a washboard may be more useful, to give you something to occupy yourself with while the hard spaghetti of your dwindling food supply slowly absorbs tepid rainwater, and you wish that you’d actually moved to Siberia and learned to live off the land as you once considered while handling a frustrating bug in production that you could’ve solved with Claude.

> [..] but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results without actually doing the work yourself in the first place.

No. In learning, there is no substitution to practice. Once you jump to the conclusion, you stop understanding the "why".

Throughout various stages of technological advancement, we've come with tools to help relieve us of tedious efforts, because we understood the "why", the underlying reason of what the tools were helping us solve in the first place. Those that understood the "why" could build upon those tools to further advance civilization. The others were left behind to parrot about something they did not understand.

But -and, ironically in this case- as with most things in life, it is about the journey and not the destination. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if we take a more efficient road, or a less efficient road, to reach a life lesson.

Enjoy your journey!

Indeed, taking the work of others, stripping the license and putting it on a photocopier is the most efficient way of "work". This is progress, not a problem.

Those damn kids, compilers and linters doing all the work for them. Back in my day we punched bits into a card by hand. /s

It's just people ranting about another level of abstraction, like always.

Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.

Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.

Time is always scarce.

Is humanity itself a mistake? The fall of man himself? Are we to be redeemed through blog posts in the great 21st century AI flamewars?

There's a reason these technologies are so controversial. They question our entire existence.

These threads of conversation border on religious debate.

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow.

No, it wasn't.

What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day.

SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource. I use both every day, same as I almost always have one screen dedicated to some documentation page.

The problem is not using the tools available. The problem is relying 100% on these tools, with no skill or care of ones own.

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases.

i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that has come.

IMO the skill gap just widens exponentially now. you will either have the competent developers who use these tools accelerate their learning and/or output some X factor, and on the other hand you will have literally garbage being created or people who just figure out they can now expend 1/10 the effort and time to do something and just coast, never bother to even understand what they wrote.

just encountered that with some interviews where people can now scaffold something up in record time but can't be bothered to refine it because they don't know how. (ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.)

The issues I see are that private chats are information blackholes whereas public stuff like SO can show up in a search and help more than just the original asker (can also be easily referenced / shared). Also the fact that these chatbots are wrong / make stuff up a lot.

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore

And it kind of was a problem. There was an underclass of people who simply could not get anything done if it wasn't already done for them in a Stackoverflow answer or a blog post or (more recently and bafflingly) a Youtube video. These people never learned to read a manual and spent their days flailing around wondering why programming seemed so hard for them.

Now with AI there will be more of these people, and they will make it farther in their careers before their lack of ability will be noticeable by hiring managers.

I think it's unwise to naively copy code from either stack overflow or an AI, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the one that had been peer-reviewed by other humans every time.

> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs.

from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree.

(to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them).

> I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better.

it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet.

i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah).

he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft.

conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him.

that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be).

so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end.

essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).

Oh, heck. We didn’t need AI to do that. That’s been happening forever.

It’s not just bad optics; it’s destructive. It discourages folks from learning.

AI is just another tool. There’s folks that sneer at you if you use an IDE, a GUI, a WYSIWYG editor, or a symbolic debugger.

They aren’t always boomers, either. As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve been looking up noses, my entire life. Often, from folks much younger than me.

It’s really about basic human personal insecurity, and we all have that, to some degree. Getting around it, is a big part of growing up, so a lot of older folks are actually a lot less likely to pull that crap than you might think.

I wonder if Google Gemini is trained on all the millions of books that were scanned and that Google were not able to be used for their original purposes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

As other AI companies argue, copyright doesn't apply when training, it should give Google a huge advantage to be able to use all the worlds books they scanned.

Interesting if that's literally true since you have to _search_ YouTube, unless maybe people ask chatgpt what search terms to use.

If AI can't find it, how do we?

I am unable to acquire knowledge from the books since 35 years ago. Had to get by with self-directed learning. The result is patchy understanding, but lot of faith in myself

How does this make sense when you can put any book inside of an LLM?

This is just the world of interviewing though, it was the same a decade ago.

The reason we ask people to do fizzbuzz is often just to weed out the shocking number of people who cannot code at all.

But it is. Some knowledge and questions are simply increasingly outdated. If the (correct) answer on how to implement Fibonacci is one LLM query away, then why bother knowing? Why should a modern day web developer be able to write assembly code, when that is simply abstracted away?

I think it will be a hot minute before nothing has to be known and all human knowledge is irrelevant, but, specially in CS, there is going to be a tremendous amount of rethinking to do, of what is actually important to know.

Well, I found these candidates long before ChatGPT

I interviewed a guy with a CCIE who couldnt detail what a port forward was. 3 years ago.

I’m 10 years in software and was never bothered to remember how to implement it the efficient way and I know many programmers who don’t know even the inefficient way but kick ass.

I once got that question in an interview for a small startup and told the interviewer: with all due respect what does that have to do with the job I’m going to do and we moved on to the next question (still passed).

If some interviewer asked me what recursion was or how to implement it, I'd answer, and then ask them if they can think of a good use case for a duff's device.

I vote for GenAI

Maybe you would have figured it out if you thought a bit more deeply about what you wanted to achieve.

You want to schedule things. What is the basic tool we use to schedule on Linux? Cron. Do you need to install it separately? No, it usually comes with most Linux images. What is your container, functionally speaking? A working Linux system. So you can run scripts on it. Lot of these scripts run binaries that come with Linux. Is there a cron binary available? Try using that.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 but breaking objectives down to their basic core can be helpful.

Like, dropping this in the middle of the conversation to force the model out of a "local minimum"? Or restarting the chat with that prompt? I'm curious how you use it to make it more effective.

That’s a cool tip; I usually just give up and start a new chat.

My experience is, that it very often reacts to a simple question with apologizing and completely flipping it's answer 180 degrees. I just ask for explanation like "is this a good way to do x,y,z?" and it goes "I apologize, you are right to point out flaw in my logic. Lets do it the opposite way."