[paulsutter]

If you’re learning to program pretty much the best approach is to write and debug programs. There isn’t a shortcut

It’s like the saying “the fog of war” (at best you have incomplete and flawed information). Programming is just like that

[raghavtoshniwal]

Agreed; but isn’t this on the same continuum as programming assembly -> IDE autocomplete -> LLM autocomplete? You’re still writing code, but generally adding abstractions has been net good (unsure of this opinion tbf, but that’s my hunch)

[nkozyra]

> If you’re learning to program pretty much the best approach is to write and debug programs.

I'd argue the best way to learn is to read a lot of production-quality code to get a sense of structure and best practices in any given language.

[paulsutter]

I’ve listened to 10,000 hours of piano music and I still can’t play anything

Debugging is the primary skill of a programmer. 90% of programming is fixing bugs, the other 10% is writing bugs.

Maybe the LLM is teaching debugging by giving bad examples :)

[nkozyra]

> I’ve listened to 10,000 hours of piano music and I still can’t play anything

I don't think this is a valid comparison. If you'd read 10,000 hours of sheet music I'd wager you'd know how to read music.

[cess11]

When I studied in Ulaan Bataar I met a professor of linguistics from eastern Europe. Before he came to Mongolia he studied a grammar book of mongolian and tried to teach himself. He was rather proud of how far he had come.

At the first lesson he realised that the characters he thought he knew how to pronounce didn't sound much like he was used to. Mongolian is generally written with cyrillic plus a few more characters, so he expected it to be like russian or bulgarian with a few more sounds.

This is not the case. Mongolian is much closer related to korean and tibetan, and commonly sounds something like drunk cats haggling over something deceased.

I find it to be roughly the same with introductory or otherwise shallow learning material about programming. You can read as many tutorials as you want, you'll still suck at it.

When the LLM:s invent books like SICP, The Art of Computer Programming, Purely Functional Data Structures, Gang of Four, then they might become tutors in this area. To me it seems they struggle hard with anything longer than a screenful.

[nkozyra]

> You can read as many tutorials as you want, you'll still suck at it.

I agree, but it's better foundation than getting something to compile and thinking you "get it."

[cess11]

Who suggested that?