747s and Coding Agents

I use AI for very little but I do like using it for stuff I'm just not very interested in but have to get done.

For programming, I don't like it. It's like a master carpenter building furniture from IKEA. Sure it's faster and he doesn't have to think very hard and the end result is acceptable but he feels lazy and after a while he feels like he is losing his skills.

The best days of computing for me were what you remember. A computer was just a blank slate. You turned it on, and had a ">" blinking on the screen. If you wanted it to do anything you had to write a program. And learning how to do that meant practice and study and reading... there were no shortcuts. It was challenging and frustrating and fun.

> I had to read books

Same here. Except that as native french speaker there simply weren't that many quality books about programming/computers that I could easily find in french.

So at 11 years old I also learned english, by myself, by using computers (which were in english back then) and by reading computer books.

And we'd exchange tips with other kids in the neighborhood who also had computers and were also learning to code (like my neighbors who eventually, 20 years later, created a software startup in SoCal).

I dont use it a lot but when I do it's pretty much 2 patterns

* "search on steroids" - get me to the thing I need or ask whether the thing I need exists, give me few examples and I can get it running.

* getting the trivial and uninteresting parts out of the way, like writing some helper function for stuff I'm doing now, I'll just call AI, let it do its thing and continue writing the code in meantime, look back ,check if it makes sense and use it.

So I'm not really cheating myself out of the learning process, just outsource the parts I know well enough that I can check for correctness but save time writing

I've always felt a little odd saying, "Back in my day we had to understand the cpu, registers, etc." It's a true statement, but doesn't help in any way. Is that stuff still worth knowing, IMHO? Yes. Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today? Absolutely.

Even people with the Internet growing up still learned largely through books, probably until StackOverflow really took off. One "hack" prior to SO that sometimes goes under-acknowledged was Google Groups. Around 2000, they bought and made free to the public the entire Deja News USENET archive, and suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually find someone who'd asked (and someone who answered) whatever question you had. And the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely high, given the barriers to entry (technical and financial) to being active on USENET's technical groups in the 90s.

Of course, asking a question was another matter, likely to result in a rebuke for violating the group's arcane decorum. But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up against something that wasn't covered in some FAQ or manpage.

I learned to program on a Commodore 64 using books I could get from libraries and some magazines like Compute!'s Gazette. I got online very early via BBSes (originally on a 300 baud modem for my C64) and was on the internet by the mid to late 1980s.

I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just faster.

LLMs feel entirely different to me, and that's where I do get the sense that they make things "too easy" in that (like the author of the OP blog post) I no longer feel like I am building any sort of skill when using them other than code review (which is not a new skill as it is something I have previously done with code produced by other humans for a long time).

As with the OP author I also think that "prompting" as a skill is hugely overblown. "Prompting" was maybe a bit more of a skill a year ago, but I find that you don't really have to get too detailed with current LLMs, you just have to be a bit careful not to bias them in negative ways. Whatever value I have now as a software developer has more to do with having veto power in the instances where the LLM agent goes off the rails than it does in constructing prompts.

So for now I'm stuck in a situation where I feel like for work I am being paid to do I basically have to use LLMs because not doing so is effectively malpractice at this point (because there are real efficiency gains), but for selfish reasons if I could push a button to erase the existence of LLMs, I'd probably do it.

Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted.

Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it?

Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what was happening in this exact scenario before and after.

I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I care about how authentication works as a principal, what methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3 hours trying to debug the nuances of configuring the Spring security library for a small project I dont care about?

As an older person, I'm not worried. The world changes all the time. People are put people in difficult situations, and they have to adapt. "Oh no, how will people learn things?" is not that big of a struggle in the grand scheme. We're not burning books or giving people lobotomies. People can still learn if they want to, easier than ever before. Businesses will adapt, people will adapt, by necessity. Things will be very different, sure. But then we get used to the difference, and it becomes normal.

Kids today couldn't imagine how people used to live just 100 years ago, like it was the dark ages. People from that age would probably look at kids 10 years ago and think, these poor children! They don't know how to work hard! They don't know anything about life! They're glued to these bizarre light machines! Every age is different.

At the beginning of the internet, I used to save all webpages where I’d find info, just in case I would be stuck without a connection or if the website removed it. I had parts of the MDN.

The internet never fell. I bet it’ll be the same with AI. You will never not have AI.

The big difference is the internet was a liberation movement: Everything became open. And free. AI is the opposite: By design, everything is closed.

Firstly, if you're doing those steps, you're building your own tutorial, not just following the exact steps in a manual provided with the software. The sample config won't be exact or perfect for your setup, so you'll need to say least figure out how to adjust it to your needs.

That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-style software. The first time I learned how to program, I learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands, even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the code I'd been told to write.

From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required following very simple instructions.

The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools, but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was basically useless outside of that.

The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is still practical.

If you've never put a cupboard together, you would have learned what the different parts, what size of screws to use (in the rough sense),... You may have forget it right after, but when someone ask you to help them, you will be a bit more proficient than someone with no experience.

But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.

> If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times

I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.

>hundredths of them

Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.

I interpreted this as not as good a way to learn.

I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading someone’s code doesn’t teach me all the wrong ways they attempted before it looked like the way it now does.