this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I won't hold my breath on it.
Up until this minute, AI has produced plentiful examples of how it can produce anything but good code.
I'd rather have a developer writing software, slowly, because they have an intelectual itch and want to try and see the outcome of their idea than the proverbial army of monkeys furiously typing away.
It's pretty useful replacing stack overflow that could also generate code specific to your project. It's also useful for testing. Like any tool, it has its use cases.
I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.
Personal preference.
That's a great way to do it, but human attention on your code is a scarce and valuable resource. LLMs are great for the sort of lazy stupid questions where you benefit from a quick answer, but also don't want to waste someone else's time on. When you are learning nearly all the questions you'll have will be like this, your progress is gated on finding the answers, and even if you are taking a class and it's someone's job to look at your code and help you understand what's wrong with it, you have to wait your turn for that and only get so much help.
and there are so many cases in programming where you can save hours asking a really simple question that should be easy to figure out on your own but actually isn't.
@fubbernuckin Well yes, but those hours are called "learning". Learning must hurt, it's a change in the brain, that pain will change you, you want to be changed. You will not learn to figure things out if you just always reach for the robot at the sign of first trouble.
No, learning is there part where you have to think. That's not when you use the robot. You use the robot when the documentation is trash and unusable and every answer you find is out of date. You use the robot when you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it and you don't have time to trawl through the docs for the next 2 hours. You use the robot when the only gimp 2.10 tutorial on earth for how to write plugins tells you to use this funny program called gimptool but you're new to gimp dev so you look online to see what that is only to find that there's no mention of it literally anywhere besides your current tutorial and a disjointed man page where you can't find the source anywhere, and the devs are all on irc and you don't want to bother them and you're worried that they're just going to tell you to read the tutorial you already came from and you'll leave empty handed. That's when you ask the robot. It has a use, you don't have to substitute your thinking to use it.
@fubbernuckin Right, so you only substitute "how to read documentation" and "how to talk to people on IRC", great...
Know what, that's stupid and reductive and not even accurate to what I said, but fuck it, yes. Yes actually. Because i value my time and sanity and other people's time and sanity. Just because i eat out every now and then doesn't mean I can't cook.
@fubbernuckin Because you did spend that time to learn cooking somewhere in the past. Look, I teach IT students, and there is a very clear difference between those who use ChatGPT for everything, and those who try to figure things out. Even asking the right questions from people on IRC is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. You don't see it, because you haven't grown up in a world with ChatGPT since the start, so you did already learn that. But can you ever stop learning?
Alright, you do have a point there. Reading docs and asking questions is a skill too, and if you haven't learned them yet then chatgpt can stunt your growth there, i agree with that much.
I still think that chatgpt, if used correctly, can be a huge boon to your education. Knowing how to interact with those bots to avoid their shortcomings and not use them as a crutch I think is also a skill worth learning.
The other problem is unlike stack overflow, a helpful answer by an AI isn't visible and indexed therefore someone else has to do another prompt for the potential answer.