Right because it's impossible for people to learn things themselves. Knowledge must only be passed down by The Gatekeeper.
I'm starting to feel like the programming community is just mad things are easier to learn now.
I'm starting to feel like the programming community is just mad things are easier to learn now.
The danger seems to be code that is syntactically correct and compiles without errors, but is logically incorrect.
As a noob I copied code from Railscasts or Stack Overflow or docs or IRC without understanding it just to get things working. And then at some point I was doing less and less of it, and then rarely at all.
But what if the code I copied isn't correct?! Didn't the sky fall down? Well, things would break and I would have to figure out why or steal a better solution, and then I could observe the delta between what didn't work vs what worked. And boom, learning happened.
LLMs just speed that cycle up tremendously. The concern trolling over LLMs basically imagines a hypothetical person who can't learn anything and doesn't care. More power to them imo if they can build what they want without understanding it. That's a cracked lazy person we all should fear.
In our startup we are short on frontend software engineers.
Our project manager started helping with the UI using an IDE (cursor a VS-code fork) with native ChatGPT integration. In the span of six months, they have become very proficient at React.
They had wanted to learn basic frontend coding for multiple years but never managed to pass the initial hurdles.
Initially, they were only accepting suggestions made by ChatGPT and making frequent errors, but over time, they started understanding the code better and actively telling the LLM how to improve/fix it.
Now, I believe they would have the knowledge to build simple functional React frontends without assistance, but the question is why? As a team with an LLM-augmented workflow, we are very productive.
I’m not saying that React is hard to learn. But I believe buying a good book would have them get there quicker.
I'm a senior React Dev and the code is totally fine. No more anti-patterns than juniors who I've worked with who learned without AI. The contrary actually.
Not gonna fault people for learning, think the FUD is more so in the vein of being ignorant while working.
Yea, you dont really need to know how transistors work to code, but you didnt need that for 2 generations. Personally think (and hope), LLM code tools replace google and SO, more so than writing SW itself.
I got my start on a no-code visual editor. Hated it because the 5% of issues it couldn't handle took 80% of my time (with no way to actually do it in many cases). See LLM auto generation as the same, the problems that the tool dosent just solve will be your jobs, and you still need to know things for that.
Are you sure that would work for others? And that other approaches might not be more effective?
I’ve learned lots of things from SO. The top voted answers usually provide quite a bit of “why” content which have general utility or pointers to more general content.
Yes, there are insufferable people on there, but there are gatekeepers and self-centered people everywhere.
Because they’re consistent and they follow (the good ones) a clear path to learn what you want to learn. The explanations may not be obvious at first glance and that’s when you may need somone to present to you in another perspective (your teacher) or provide the required foundational knowledge that you may lack. You pair it with some practice or do cross-reference with other books and you can get very far. Also they’re can be pretty dense in terms of information.
> which books, or what YT channels were useful.
I mostly read manuals nowadays, instead of tutorials. But I remember starting with the “Site du Zero” books (a French platform) for C and Python. As tech is moving rapidly, for tutorial like books, it’s important to get the latest one and know which software versions it’s referring to.
Now I keep books like “Programming Clojure”, “The GO Programming Language”, “Write Great Code” series, “Mastering Emacs”, “The TCP/IP Guide”, “Absolute FreeBSD”, “Using SQlite”, etc. They’re mostly for references purposes and deep dive in one subject.
The videos I’m talking about were Courses from Coursera and MIT. Algorithms, Android Programming, Theory of Computation. There are great videos on Youtube, but they’re hidden under all the worthless one.
"Easier to get code submitted to a code base" is only marginally correlated with learning anything.