[beej71]

Speaking as an instructor, everyone's goal should be to be better than the LLM. This includes teachers. And, yes, that requires work, but that's what we're getting paid for, and it's not particularly difficult to best an LLM in any field.

If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer.

In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make those themselves with minimal effort and zero cost.

[recursivecaveat]

It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.

[beej71]

I tell the students up front that AI is capable of solving all the problems we give them as undergrads. But I elaborate and tell them that it's because all the problems we give them are easy for software developers with any experience, regardless of how difficult the students find them to be. They're dumbbells designed to help you build muscle. Do you take your robot to the gym to lift the weights for you? Eventually you're going to get to a job interview and they're going to see that you don't have any muscles. And then you'll be 80 grand in debt with no job prospects. You might as well just quit now and buy a Corvette.

I like to think that it has some impact, and yet I know they still use AI.

[squishington]

I was drawn to engineering by the joy of learning and problem solving. The pain of puzzling over a difficult problem, then the ecstatic release when you figure it out and get it working. I don't understand why someone would want to give that up. It gives meaning to the work.

[beej71]

Pretty much all the experienced devs I know are bored with AI at work. Most of them just turn it off because it's in the way.

I know for some jobs it's a great accelerator, but those jobs tend to be the ones that don't involve a lot of heavy duty problem solving, it seems.