[gwbas1c]

> Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI?

Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?

Basically, force students to do it by hand long enough that they understand the essentials. Introduce LLMs at a point similar to when you allow students to use a calculator.

[palata]

> Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?

Calculators have made most people a lot worse in arithmetic. Many people, for instance, don't even grasp what a "30%" discount is. I mean other than "it's a discount" and "it's a bigger discount than 20% and lower than 40%". I have seen examples where people don't grasp that 30% is roughly one third. It's just a discount, they trust it.

GPS navigation has made most people a lot worse at reading maps or generally knowing where they are. I have multiple examples where I would say something like "well we need to go west, it's late in the day so the sun will show us west" and people would just not believe me. Or where someone would follow their GPS on their smartphone around a building to come back 10m behind where they started, without even realising that the GPS was making them walk the long way around the building.

Not sure the calculator is a good example to say "tools don't make people worse with the core knowledge".

[jen729w]

GPS has also ruined our city-level spatial awareness.

Before, you had the map. So you were aware that Fitzroy was to the west of Collingwood and both were south of Clifton Hill and so on. I had dozens of these suburbs roughly mapped out in my mind.

Driving down an unfamiliar road, one could use signs to these suburbs as a guide. I might not know exactly where I was, but I had enough of an idea to point me in the right direction.

That skill has disappeared.

[squirrel55583]

>Before, you had the map. So you were aware that Fitzroy was to the west of Collingwood and both were south of Clifton Hill and so on. I had dozens of these suburbs roughly mapped out in my mind.

>Driving down an unfamiliar road, one could use signs to these suburbs as a guide. I might not know exactly where I was, but I had enough of an idea to point me in the right direction.

Reading those sentences feels like I am dreaming. The exploration... The possibilities... Serendipitously finding you way through and getting temporarily lost at night in a big friendly suburban area with trees and in summer...

[quantified]

Apparently 1/3 lb hamburgers didn't help A&W against McDonald's because too many people thought 1/3 is smaller than 1/4. So the Quarter Pounder remains supreme. Snopes: [https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fr...]

[rainsford]

But how important is the core knowledge if it isn't necessary to achieve the outcomes people actually value? People only cared about map reading skills to the extent that it got them where they want to go. Once GPS became a thing, especially GPS on mobile phones, getting them where they want to go via map reading became irrelevant. Yes, there are corner cases where map reading or general direction finding skills are useful, but GPS does a vastly better and quicker job in the large majority of cases so our general way-finding experience has improved.

This is especially true because the general past alternative to using GPS to find some new unfamiliar place wasn't "read a map" it was "don't go there in favor of going some place you already knew" in a lot of cases. I remember the pre-GPS era, and my experience in finding new stuff is significantly better today than it was back then.

[j_w]

Using map reading skills as a proxy for this is a bit of a strawman. People who use GPS habitually have worse navigational and spatial awareness skills.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

If you habitually use a calculator for all arithmetic, could the result not be similar? What if you reach to an LLM for all your coding, general research, etc.? These tools may vastly speed up some workflows, but your brain is a muscle.

[palata]

I think you're missing the point, which is to say "those tools make us more productive, but less knowledgeable".

And you answer by saying "it's okay to be less knowledgeable (and hence depend on the tool), as long as you are more productive". Which is a different question.

But to me it's obviously not desirable: if AI allows people to completely lose all sense of critical thinking, I think it's extremely dangerous. Because whoever controls the AI controls those people. And right now, look at the techbros who control the AIs.

So the original question is: is it the case that AI reduces the skills of the people who use them? The calculator and the GPS are examples given to suggest that it doesn't sound unlikely.

[ethbr1]

At the end of the day, it's the average productivity across a population that matters.

So GPS makes people worse at orienteering -- on average, does it get everyone where they need to go, better / faster / easier?

Sometimes, the answer is admittedly no. Google + Facebook + TikTok certainly made us less informed when they cannibalized reporting (news media origination) without creating a replacement.

But on average, I'd say calculators did make the population more mathematically productive.

After all, lots of people sucked at math before them too.

[palata]

> After all, lots of people sucked at math before them too.

A calculator doesn't do maths, it does arithmetic. People sucked at maths, but I'm pretty sure they were better with arithmetic.

> At the end of the day, it's the average productivity across a population that matters.

You're pushing my example. My point is that AI may actually make the average developer worse. Sure, also more productive. So it will reinforce this trend that has been in the software industry for more than a decade: produce more but worse software.

Productivity explains why we do it. It doesn't mean it is desirable.

[ethbr1]

You're looking at this from a human-centric perspective.

I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.

It's easily possible for an organization to be more productive with worse developers because of the tools they have access to.

And no, that's not some slight of verbal hand in measuring "productive" -- they are able to ship more value, faster.

[fzeroracer]

> And no, that's not some slight of verbal hand in measuring "productive" -- they are able to ship more value, faster.

Ship more value faster is exactly a verbal slight of hand. That's the statement used by every bad product manager and finance asshole to advocate for shipping out broken code faster. It's more value because more code is more content, but without some form of quality guard rails you run into situations where everything breaks. I've been on teams just like that where suddenly everything collapses and people get mad.

[ethbr1]

Do you think compilers helped teams ship more value faster from worse developers? IDEs with autocomplete? Linters?

At the end of the day, coders are being paid money to produce something.

It's not art -- it's a machine that works and does a thing.

We can do that in ways that create a greater or lesser maintenance burden, but it's still functional.

LLM coding tools detractors are manufacturing reasons to avoid using another tool that helps them write code.

They need to get over the misconception of what the job is. As another comment previously quipped 'If you want to write artisanal, hand-tuned assembly that's beautiful, do that on your own time for a hobby project.'

[palata]

> I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.

What is objective? That profitability is good? We're destroying our environment to the point where many of us will die from it for the sake of profitability. We're over-using limited natural resources for the sake of profitability. In my book that's not desirable at all.

Companies are profit-maximising machines. The path to more profitability tends to be enshittification: the company makes more money by making it worse for everybody. AI most definitely requires more resources and it seems like those resources will be used to do more, but of lower quality.

Surely that's profitable. But I don't think it is desirable.

[ethbr1]

Responded to you down below, but will say here that profit is a two-sided coin.

Decreasing the cost of production can lead to more profit or cheaper product prices.

I 100% agree that the trend of quality has been downwards in many things over the past 20 years or so.

[monkeyelite]

> it's the average productivity across a population that matters.

That’s not clear to me at all.

[istjohn]

I'm unconvinced that calculators have made most people a lot worse in arithmetic. There have always been people who are bad at math. It's likely there are fewer people who can quickly perform long division on paper, but it's also possible the average person is _more_ numerate because they can play around with a calculator and quickly build intuition.

[palata]

> I'm unconvinced that calculators have made most people a lot worse in arithmetic. There have always been people who are bad at math.

Arithmetic is a subset of maths.

[MangoToupe]

Arithmetic is also near-useless if you have access to a calculator. It's also a completely different skill thab reasoning about numbers, which is a very useful skill.

[nitwit005]

But, logically, you need to spend time thinking about numbers to be good reasoning about them, and the calculator is about reducing that time.

I feel there's a bit of a paradox, with many subjects, where we all know the basics are the absolute most important thing, but when we see the basics taught in the real world, it seems insultingly trivial.

[MangoToupe]

I understand what you're saying, but I legitimately am unconvinced learning long division is necessary to learn by hand to master division. If anything, perhaps we should be asking children to derive arithmetic from use of a calculator.

[SoftTalker]

I think it’s pretty hard to reason about numbers without having mastered arithmetic. Or at least beat your brain against it long enough that you understand the concepts even if you don’t have all the facts memorized.

[MangoToupe]

I disagree; i think the focus on arithmetic actually enables people saying they're "bad at math" when symbolic reasoning is a completely different (and arguably much easier) skill. You an easily learn algebra without knowing long division.

Hell, if I had to do long division today without a computer I'd have to re-derive it.

[recursive]

I can do plenty of arithmetic much faster than I could type it on a calculator keypad. That's like saying hardware keyboards are near-useless if you have access to a touchscreen.

[MangoToupe]

I just don't really work much with arithmetic to begin with. Almost 100% of the numerical work I do is symbolic.

[creakingstairs]

Sure there have always been people bad at math. But basic arithmetic is not really math. We used to drill it into kids but we no longer do so and I can usually see the difference between generations. For example, women in my mother’s generation were not prioritised for education but they often are pretty quick at arithmetic. But kids and young adults I come across pull out their phones for basic additions and divisions. And I find myself pulling out my phone more and more often.

I mean it’s not the end of the world and as you’ve said the raw number of people of numerate people are rising thanks to technology. But technology also seem to rob people of motivation to learn somewhat useful skills and even more so with LLMs.

[techpineapple]

"it's also possible the average person is _more_ numerate because they can play around with a calculator and quickly build intuition."

This is not actually possible.

[MangoToupe]

Why? I am honestly befuddled with this response. manually computing arithmetic is not necessary to reason about numbers.

[devmor]

> manually computing arithmetic is not necessary to reason about numbers

It absolutely is. If you can't add or subtract, what reasoning are you doing that is worthwhile?

[MangoToupe]

You can grasp the concept without executing the mechanics. I don't see how that's difficult to grasp.

[nsonha]

You're confusing maths with accounting. 30% is an intuition/familiarity, not knowledge.

[palata]

I'm not confused. A calculator does arithmetic, not maths. The question was:

> Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?

Which doesn't make much sense, because a calculator doesn't do maths. So I answered the question that does make sense: if everyone uses a calculator, do we still learn arithmetic? And I believe we don't.

And then, if we suck at basic arithmetic, it makes it harder to be good at maths.

[fizx]

Writing has made people worse at memorization. This argument has been around since Plato.

[monkeyelite]

That’s also true though. In oral societies they memorize a lot more.

[presentation]

But somehow I was born in the age of GPS and yet I ended up with a strong mental map and navigation skills.

I suspect there will be plenty of people who grow up in the age of LLMs and maybe by reading so much generated code, or just coding things themselves for practice, will not have a hard time learning solid coding skills. It may be easy to generate slop, but it’s also easy to access high quality guidance.

[username223]

If calculators were unreliable... Well, we'd be screwed if everyone blindly trusted them and never learned math.

They'd also be a whole lot less useful. Calculators are great because they always do exactly what you tell them. It's the same with compilers, almost: imagine if your C compiler did the right thing 99.9% of the time, but would make inexplicable errors 0.1% of the time, even on code that had previously worked correctly. And then CPython worked 99.9% of the time, except it was compiled by a C compiler working 99.9% of the time, ...

But bringing it back on-topic, in a world where software is AI-generated, and tests are AI-generated (because they're repetitive, and QA is low-status), and user complaints are all fielded by chat-bots (because that's cheaper than outsourcing), I don't see how anyone develops any expertise, or how things keep working.

[gwbas1c]

Early calculators were unreliable. Assume that AI based coding will improve.

[sarchertech]

What early calculators were unreliable?

I’m unaware of any, but even if there is an example it was before they were in widespread use.

[mmasu]

While I agree with your suggestion, the comparison does not hold: calculators do not tell you which numbers to input and compute. With an LLM you can just ask vaguely, and get an often passable result

[gwbas1c]

Then figure out how to structure the assignment to make students show their work. If a student doesn't understand the concept, it will show in how they prompt AI.

For example, you could require that students submit all logs of AI conversations, and show all changes they made to the code produced.

IE, yesterday I asked ChatGPT how to add a copy to clipboard button in MudBlazor. It told me the button didn't exist, and then wrote the component for me. That saved me a bunch of research; but I needed to refactor the code for various reasons.

So, if this was for an assignment, I could turn in both my log from ChatGPT, and then show the changes I made to the code ChatGPT provided.