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by keyle 478 days ago
It's interesting you write this. I have a long experience and I use these auto complete on drugs now... I can't see myself writing all the damn code myself anymore.

I remember the days of using books, having to follow the code bits in the book as I typed them. I don't remember diddly squat about it. Same from years of stack overflow. I'd just alt-tab 12 times, read the comments, then read another answer, assess the best answer. Massive waste of time.

Use all the technology you have at your hands I say. But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.

1 comments

> But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.

But that's IMO exactly what your parent commenter says. Use LLMs only after you actually have a clue what are they producing. So if you are a beginner, basically don't because you'll not have any understanding.

Agreed with you, although I'd say there is a spectrum between "do everything the hardest way" and "don't learn anything". I think LLM-based tools can be a great time-saver for boilerplate repetitive code, and they can sometimes help you get a first draft of some implementation you're not fully seeing yet, but you definitely should not rely on them to write the whole code for you if you want to learn.
Nope, the theme of the parent was...

>Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career.

I totally disagree with it too and think its no different than using a book or SO from the past. As a Junior you copy paste many more lines of codes that you don't full appreciate and sometimes it simply just takes time of doing that to absorb the knowledge.

I don't think we disagree at all btw. IMO we all agree understanding of what the spat-out code actually does is mandatory and absolutely is NOT optional. The rest are really just details.

I agree that nowadays LLMs can fill in for SO and Reddit.

Definitely we agree. I was only stating that the OP's opinion of don't use any LLM for the first 3 years could be disastrous.