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Comment by jvm___ | Hacker News Reader

So. I made a deal with my kids that they could have a phone if they made an app. There's enough youtube tutorials and they're old enough to follow them. I could have helped them more over the summer, but we didn't get it done.

Now ChatGPT will generate the flutter code for an app in seconds, as well as guide you with 'show me how to install flutter'. It's crazy that all the code is written for you. I tried one of their timer/todo list ideas and it generated the code, I just need to install flutter and run it today. So a summer long project of learning to code has been reduced to copy-paste instructions from an AI chat bot. Crazy times.

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>they could have a phone if they made an app

I think this is a great way to get your kids to have a habit of self-learning. In my opinions, this is the single most important skill a kid can learn.

Every time my little cousins ask me something they want to learn, I go with "Let's search for the answer together" and guide them on how to do basic research. Sometimes I ask them follow-up questions if they find the topic interesting so it gives them a sense of accomplishment. Takes little time and effort but teaches the most valuable skill.

I think it's a great way to ensure that the only motivation your kids have is external. "What's the point of doing X is no one offered me a phone for it"

When I was a kid, I heard that some friends were getting money from parents as a reward for good grades. I always had good grades so I suggested to my mom that I should get money for good grades. She said "No, because then you'll get used to only work hard when I'm offering you money". At the time my take away was just "no money, got it." But now I think it was actually an insightful observation.

Good luck teaching a small kid the concept of self-improvement as an investment into the future. You have to reward kids to create habits. They don't have the experience or the knowledge to think far ahead. The best way to reinforce a behavior is immediate reward, not a promise of "better future". The reward can be something as simple as "a sense of accomplishment" or as big as a phone as long as the perceived value of the reward is proportional to the achievement and effort.

Now re-contextualize that as if it were an employer/employee relationship. That's actually a pretty messed up lesson to teach a kid about negotiation and self worth.

But it's not an employer/employee relationship.

It teaches you that you should _also_ consider your own long term goals, as opposed to only chasing the someone else's short term goals. I think it's a great lesson to teach a kid about self-worth.

This seems like someone else imposing their own long term goals onto you because they allegedly know better.

You didn't describe any explanation of why good grades are an important step towards your own long term goals.

I'm not saying that paying for grades is a good way to motivate kids. I'm saying that framing it as "I won't pay you because it'll make you lazy" is a very weird way to teach a kid about long term payoffs.

There is this book "Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" which makes the same point, they also cite some studies about this.

Is the ChatGPT sample code/tutorials much better than the tutorials that can be found on Google?

Create me a flutter app that has a list of todo items. Each item has a timer. The list shows one item at the top and when it's timer finishes the next one in the list moves to the top.

That prompt, or something like it, generated Futter code along with the instructions of how to modify a default flutter app for the code to work.

I haven't ran the code yet, but all the other code samples I asked for worked.

Asking for a ruby Student, Teacher application where the student takes multiple courses and the teacher can assign a grade to each course.

After you get that code, you can clarify in your next question.

I want each course to have progress steps.

More generated ruby code..

Can you add a grade for each progress step, and can the teacher have the ability to unlock the next progress steps.

Generates more code.

Then.

Generate me a react front end for this.

Generates React code.

I didn't install/run the code, but it looked accurate and had comments explaining what the lines of code did.

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GitHub code works, ChatGPT code works, and does exactly what you want, and you can modify it just by asking.

"Change the progress array to be an object that has a grade, started date, finished date and parent acknowledgement."

That actually works as an example after the bot generated the initial app.

We're in for a world of changes.

That is what though, 2 hours of coding for an experienced dev? And the trade off is you have no context over the code running your product?

2 hours of coding for an experienced dev

Sure, building a table is a two hour job for an experienced wood-worker.

If a grade 7 student can make an app by - Describing what they want it to do - Copy/pasting some code - And running it.

That's a leap forward in my books.

The first barrier to making apps has been the time involved in to learn the syntax, if that's gone in the first days of this app, what's next? Do we teach how to write code anymore, or just to read and understand it?

Sounds like copying from GitHub with extra steps

It's more like having an assistant who can do it for you so you need no/little knowledge of GitHub.

Less steps as the code it generates will do what you ask of it, or be modified based on your english language changes.

It also gives you a human readable section, in addition to the code, that tells you what the code is doing, and where exactly to copy/paste it to make it run.

Give me an app in flutter that does X How do I install flutter How do I run my first flutter app

That only requires typing and reading for exactly the results you want.

Github only gives you what you know already. ChatGPT only gives you what you asked for, and holds your hand for how to use it.

IME no - but its NLP is much better than any search engine, so it's a lot easier to get a more specific answer/example.

Vs. searching for results on StackOverflow and similar, you'd probably have to combine results on 'how to basic flutter app', 'intro to programming', 'todo list example app [perhaps not in flutter]', and even then it wouldn't be exactly what you wanted if you were looking for specific requirements.

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