[code-faster]

The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them.

This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.

[ahofmann]

Yes. Ten years ago some friends asked me to teach PHP to them, I showed them the book I learned from 20 years ago. It had 1200 pages and you could learn web development and MySQL without using the Internet. No one used that book. They searched for easy ingestable tutorials and went from there. After a year, some of them actually wrote software in production. I can't know if more or less of them would be able to write software, if they had used the book. But sure enough, I was disappointed that they didn't.

My oldest son doesn't even use tutorials, he uses LLMs. Only time will tell, if his way is worse than mine. And right now, I think it doesn't really matter _how_ he learns writing software. It matters more that he doesn't stop doing that.

[renegat0x0]

Method of acquiring is not necessarily equal to knowledge.

I never liked learning from books. I often played with code myself. In the long term I think this had some negative effect, where I did not learn all the things but used more common solutions over and over.

I like writing with LLMs, as it sometimes show a pattern I never could think of. This also teaches me new ways to solve a problem / write a code.

[xtracto]

Hehe, in 2000 I bought the 2nd edition of the book "Beginning Linux Programming (Programmer to programmer series)" [1] and learnt so much about Linux programming, and programming in general.

For us people 40+, even "Stack Overflow" was the easy/lazy way to get knowledge. There was something called expertsexchange.com at some point in the 2000 (but it became pay-walled at some point). But generally, downloading PDFs from Emule or going to the library was THE way to learn.

Fortunately, nowadays we have LLMs and tools that are way better. No regrets, and I am so happy to live in this era.

[1] Beginning Linux Programming (Programmer to Programmer) 2nd edition by Stones, Richard, Matthew, Neil (2000) Paperback

[dabockster]

dusts off HN account

AI coding is even more impactful considering that most coding-oriented AIs will explain what the generated code does. My offline combo of Ollama, Qwen Coder 14b, and the Continue.dev VS Code extension will always explain what it did at the end of each chat message in understandable English. And if I'm still confused, I can literally type in "I don't understand these changes could you walk me through it" and it will walk me through the code changes with the whole codebase as context/RAG material. All running on-device with no token limits or subscription fees (runs really slow, but still $0), only limited by the computer hardware itself.

In fact, I credit my AI stack with removing a huge coding "writer's block" I've had since recovering from a mental health crisis right before the start of the COVID lockdown, and has made me fall in love with building software all over again.

And it's only going to get even better the more open/shared source on-device stuff gets released. Forget multimodal models, these specialized tools are where the real magic is happening!

[antifa]

Some people learn better by doing rather than getting info dumped.

[abrookewood]

You're absolutely right, but I'd add that there is still an element of truth to the article - someone who struggles through a manual will retain more than someone who re-implements an answer from Stack Overflow, who will retain more than someone who gets the working code handed to them by an LLM.

[kamaal]

>>many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems.

Im guessing its only a matter of time we see newer programming languages specially invented to work in the LLM era. So the same old processes like ever before continue. You need to understand things in a fundamental way else you won't have a clue what is going on.

You could say you still need to have done a fair of code work without LLMs to work through difficult to find and fix bugs.