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Comment by secretforest | Hacker News Reader

I got into IT because I want to be challenged. Asking some generative AI bot about how to write a better hotpatch function or how to automate a terribly-detailed set of steps that require two people would defeat my own learning. I'd rather take 3 days to sort that out than solve it in minutes with AI. I get better by slogging it out and the mistakes I make help me avoid future mistakes.

I don't want the answers, per se, I want guidance. AI would solve the issue for me. I don't want some bot thinking for me. I'll retire when I cannot suss out how to write code that solves problems or makes life easier.

And yes, I'm one of those holdouts who has never had the desire to even test out generative AI. I'm not worried about it supplanting me. I worried that I will lose my own edge and curiosity.

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> Asking some generative AI bot about how to write a better hotpatch function or how to automate a terribly-detailed set of steps that require two people would defeat my own learning. I'd rather take 3 days to sort that out than solve it in minutes with AI. I get better by slogging it out and the mistakes I make help me avoid future mistakes.

That is a good answer. Certain kinds of tools can become a crutch that limit you and stifle your own development. Maybe that's tolerable when it's not a core skill (e.g. never learning your way around your city because you only know how to react to GPS prompts), but when you're talking about a core job skill, it's a recipe for disaster (e.g. letting your skills atrophy or not developing them in the first place).

As an alternative, you can seek learning and opportunity to learn through other means even when assisted by AI.

For me, AI assistance has simply sped up the code I already know how to write (like structured test setups etc.) so I can focus more on the problems related to the business, which AI has no clue how to solve.

While I think there has been a lot of hype in generative AI and expecting it to replace programming as we know it is premature at least, programming has always become "less challenging" over time due to improvements in technology. The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly. Then there were compiled languages like Fortran and Cobol that were far easier than machine code/assembly. Then higher level languages, etc.

Same with (after HLLs, and in rough historical order, over a few decades), 4GLs, CASE tools, OOP / OOAD / UML / round-trip engineering, NoSQL, Functional Programming, what, not, ML, AI, ... ;)

What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?

Or that George Santayana quote.

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

> Or that George Santayana quote.

Which one?

Good question, actually. Thanks for asking.

I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:

[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ] .

Yeah, I wondered whether that might be the one. But it's slightly different from the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose quote, so I thought maybe you had a different one in mind. (Santayana was known for his aphorisms.)

Yes, they are two different quotes. I didn't mean to use them as equivalent. It was more like, I used both, because both were applicable in the context I used them in.

>The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly.

IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:

"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"

They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.

The way I use genAI, is exactly as you describe - it's my ultimate rubber duck, one that's actually smart and can talk back.

I use ChatGPT as a study partner in learning new direct-skills, as a soft-skills partner in navigating business dynamics, and a strategy partner in product work. It's very good at helping me learn to think better.

GPT 4 is basically useless for outputting the type of code (or writing) I need on a regular basis. It just doesn't have the right context to even be a viable tool beyond boilerplate/bootstrapping.

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