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Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
When you did math and long division by hand in highschool did you enjoy it? Did you feel like you lost something when you were allowed to use a graphing calculator on a test?
In university I dreaded exams that allowed calculators because I knew how much harder the exam was going to be - that's what genai is today in my experience.
Yes we don't need manual calculators as a profession anymore to land rockets, same as we don't need a programmer to necessarily fiddle around with divs or structs - but the exams are harder now. Now we need to spend our time actually considering trade offs and actually doing software engineering. This is harder and maybe not everyone who's had that job title is particularly good at that - but that's the new skill to get good at, and because the world is under constrained making design and implementation decisions will essentially always need to be done by the person building the thing.
If you liked the programming bit, I'm sorry - I'm personally happy I don't have to remember regex or how to figure out how to center a div or span again.
Centering a div and using regex are basic programming skills that aren’t some kind of difficult exercise or the privilege of a select few. Everyone working (at least on typical business CRUD applications) should know how to use these tools.
If you don’t then I’m sorry - maybe you shouldn’t be a programmer.
Building that project today, would not be impressive or particularly hard. There are great references available today to illustrate how to build that. Sure LLMs aren't 100% accurate, neither is an intern or junior dev you might offload a task to. Part of the job of a software engineer is collaboration. Understanding how to collaborate with teammates (local, AI, outsourced) and how to ship when your teammates make mistakes is quite important to know how to resolve.
That's why CI/CD and TTD exists! If you have a project where correctness is critical, why haven't you written a test to validate that correctness?
But yeah you need to know how to write a regex, if you want to be a programmer.
But yeah, you're completely right.
Just don't use screens so much and you will be just fine.
Once a something becomes a seamlessly integrated and essential part of daily life, "just don't do the bad thing" can become very, very difficult. There was a time where spending all day on the internet was considered maladaptive, and online dating? That's for losers who can't find a match in the real world! Just don't go online so much, and you will be just fine.
I believe the advice is more like maybe you shouldn't eat the thumbtacks.
Using ai to generate code is one thing asking for book recommendations, career advice, floating business ideas, talking it to it like a friend, running grand ideas past it is not the same.
It's a program that processes and generates words treating it like a person is a one way ticket to depression and delusional thinking.
I think AI is useful as a tool in some situations. I use it sometimes as a kind of "google that for me" short cut to save time looking up things I already know. But I don't trust it for things outside my knowledge as I can't be sure if it's correct. I think op biggest issue here is when they start chatting with it normally. AI as a replacement for real human connection is a terrible thing.
One thing I do like using AI for is basically mindless busiwork. Like "I've a list of 1,000 unsorted 12 digit numbers, please count them all, tell me how many repeats, and arrange them in ascending order."
But even then I'm better off programming something if it is more than a one off. Because I still need to check the AI and make sure it's correct.
Only saves a marginal amount of time in certain circumstances.
I really don't like how people just trust what it spits out though without thinking. Eventually someone is gonna do something really stupid with it that causes major issues, like AI powered ATC that ends up crashing planes together. Or something equally grim.
Really I think the tech is interesting and has some really potentially useful applications but right now everyone seems to think it's a magic bullet that solves everything and I don't think really understand the limitations or realities of implementing it to be anything useful.
Personally in my own life I've barely any use for it. Certainly none I'd be willing to pay for. I don't understand how it will be monetized. I basically still treat it like a novelty myself.
I don't much worry about my job getting replaced with AI. It well might but, then I'll just do something else for awhile until they need a specialist who actually understands what is going on without AI (and will charge whatever I want).
Gotta say that it is insane to me that people will use tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of hardware to do things like that.
> Well, it made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.
After burning out hard a few years ago and doing this job with literally nothing to show for close to 20 years.I have to say I was already all of those things years ago before AI came along. So the idea of having something do the coding for me is actually refreshing.
Code is stupid the whole idea is to write less of it.