Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I Wish I had AI in college.

From watching slightly younger than college age kids adapt to the current world, I think you should be glad you did’t have access to LLMs during your learning years.

It’s too easy to slip from the idea that you’re just going to use the LLM to generate study materials into thinking that you’re just going to let the LLM do this homework assignment because your tired and then into a routine where ChatGPT is doing everything because you’ve come to rely on it. Then the students get slapped in the face with a sudden bad grade because the exams are in-person and they got all the way to the end of the semester with A-graded homework despite very little understanding of the material.

> It’s too easy to slip from the idea that you’re just going to use the LLM to generate study materials into thinking that you’re just going to let the LLM do this

This is exactly what people who know better are figuring out with vibe coding.

It’s extremely tempting for me to ask Claude to “do this thing that would take me three hours, but you only seconds”.

Many people are coming around to the realization that while that sometimes does work great, most of the time you ARE going to spend those three hours… you’re just going to spend it fixing, debugging, refactoring, instead of writing to begin with.

We are in a new era of ”no free lunch”.

I'm in an online degree program in mathematics in my forties and this temptation is very real. The LLMs have memorized every textbook and every exercise so it's easy to have the kinds of conversations that before I could only have with TAs during office hours, and skip the mental struggle.

At least in my most recent class, it's also wrecked the class discussion forums that I previously found very helpful. By the end half the students were just slop-posting entire conceptual explanations and exercises, complete with different terminology, notation, and methods than the class text. So you just skip those and look for the few students you know are actually trying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com