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Agree here. As a 90's kid I dove into computers, Internet and programming head first. I went into the field out of passion, not money. I received an engineering degree.

If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software.

IMHO we will see a brain drain in computer/electronics engineering in 20 years when the pipeline of graduates dwindle and those with experience retire. Hope LLMs can innovate enough to make up, I guess.

> If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software.

That sure sounds like it has nothing to do with LLMs and everything to do with factors not all related to even computer science. “Capitalism” or maybe the more trendy “late-stage capitalism” is probably more to blame here than anything else.

Also I reject the idea that there are no kids today that get involved in tech/computers for the joy of learning/exploration.

I bristle whenever I see arguments about “kids these days didn’t learn exactly how I did so it must be wrong”. It reeks of “old man yells at cloud” (note, I was also a 90’s kid). It’s the same BS I heard as a kid about how computers would rot your brain or they were horrible for <insert stupid prediction that didn’t come true>.

I agree that it reeks of old men yelling at clouds but there is data driven precedent here: with the advent of smartphones, computer literacy in education has dropped like a rock. It isn’t just kids these days, it’s a genuine shift in computing across the entire populace that happens to really effect the funnel for programmers at the entrance to that funnel. Copilots are an extension of that development, not necessarily something wholly new.

I’ve heard this anecdotally from every educator I know at the high school and college level. CS students are increasingly entering without any computer proficiency whatsoever so it has to be built up from scratch.

Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work.

PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.

Of course you’ve now effectively circled back to the early 1980s at some level when there was not a lot of expectation that college freshmen had touched a computer much less were proficient even if the wanted major in CS/EE.

I hope you're not thinking of the decline of folders - folders aren't fundamental computer science.

I think the apt analogy here isn't "old men yelling at clouds" but the historical way that one certain previous generation become more adept than those before or after at working with a certain then-new technology -- thus becoming a uniquely skilled generation in that technology, moreso than their elders or their youngers, never to be repeated again.

I'm not talking about millenials/gen X with computers -- I'm talking about silent gen/(boomers/greatest gen?) with cars.

In both cases, a new technology dominated the world, but was new and brittle at first. The kids who saw it in their youth were fascinated, but because of its brittleness they had to become at least minor experts in at least minor troubleshooting and mainteanance (like tuning a carburetor or defragging a hard disk) just to access the coolness.

I mean, it really was a pain to be a car owner in 1960. A lot like being a computer owner in 1995. If you wanted to enjoy one, you were going to need to change a spark plug or registry value once in a while. And you had to be ready to recover from an engine overheating or a blue screen of death, because these were not rare events.

Then the future generations increasingly lost touch with those skills because the technology got smoothed out as it developed further.

So I think it's quite plausible that future generations will permanently have less interest in serious skills with computers since the same thing has happened with cars. There is a way smaller perecentage of people my age (millenial) who are "into" cars or have moderate familiarity with car repair than people in their 70s. So it seems plausible the same pattern could continue to play out with computers, rather than a "old man yells at cloud" illusion

> Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware

this is a goal for maybe 2% of the industry. And those folks know their assembler or they don't get hired. I think we are producing skills in the proportion of its requirement in the industry.

Just ask the AI to write your assembly too ;)

I hate to dash your hopes of never seeing LLMs write code again but Llama3 70B is not terrible as a copilot and it’s small enough to run on comparatively cheap hardware or even consumer hardware when quantized plus it’s publicly available so from now on there will always be some form of copilot service or tool that will be in use, that ship has sailed. The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ve maxed out the capabilities of GPTs yet so as more are trained and compute becomes cheaper and as we produce and accumulate more data they should keep getting better for a while at least.

> Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case?

LLMs will not replace us, they just take some of the tedium out of writing code. Yes, they will have to be trained on new frameworks and languages but I don’t see that as a problem. People have to wait for SO questions and blog posts to be written about new frameworks and languages as it stands today.

I’m not sure I agree with your arguments about needing a lot of devs to understand assembly or the like. Or rather I disagree with your prediction of where that leads. We are effectively already there and it hasn’t led to your future. We have an amazing open source ecosystem and that billions of people rely on daily without knowing how every part of it works. Open source has only grown during that time.

I’ve never done the math myself for calculating the distance between 2 points on a globe. I just grab the Haversine formula and keep going. I don’t see that as a problem. Similarly I’ll reach for an open source library to solve a boring problem instead of doing it myself. I quite literally see no difference in that and using an LLM.

I agree with you but realistically most people are not ever going to learn that much about their job.

The people who really know the inner workings of things are compensated accordingly and there will always be these kind of people.

> it can't write shit on its own

It sure can when you use multiple agents having discussions and optimizing characteristics with each other. CrewAI and AutoGen come to mind.

Yeah, solving this problem has just about jack to do with "what is being taught."

This is beyond the classroom; this is bad incentives in the market/industry.