Comment by russfink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by russfink | Hacker News Reader

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I also teach in a university. There are two concepts: teaching with the AI, and teaching against it. At first, I want my students to gain a strong grasp of the basics, so I teach “against” it - warnings for cheating, etc. This semester, I’m also teaching “with” it. Write an algorithm that finds the cheapest way to build roads to every one of a set of cities, given costs for each street segment. I tell them to test it. Test it well. Then analyze its running time. What technique did it pick? What are the problems with this technique? Are there any others? What input would cause it to break? If I assumed (some different condition), would this change the answer?

Students today will be practitioners tomorrow, and those that know how to work with AI will be more effective than those who do not.

Yeah! Computer science students can do more "science" with the LLM. Before they spend all their time just writing and debugging. Instructors are happy if students can just write code that compiles.

When every student can write code that compiles, then you can ask them to write good code. Fast code. Robust code. Measure it, characterize it, compare it.

No they won't. It takes 10 min to be "effective" with an "AI", it takes 10 years to be effective with TAOCP.

The people who become truly effective with AI, i.e., the folks who write truly good code with it, make truly beautiful art, spend closer to effectively 10 years of man-hours than 10 mins with it.

Using AI is a skill too. People who use it every day quickly realize how poor they are at using it vs the very skilled when they compare themselves. Ever compared your own quality AI art vs the top rated stuff on Civit.AI? Pretty sure your stuff will be garbage, and the community will agree.

I don't know how that can be true. People were making very beautiful art with SD less than a year after it hit the scene. Sure, I think you need more than 10 minutes, but the time required is closer to that than it is to 10 years.

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