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by ishtanbul 202 days ago
Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.
3 comments

AI doesn't help you do higher quality work. It helps you do (or imitate) mediocre work faster. But thing is, it is hard to learn how to do excellent work without learning to do mediocre work first.
This is great for a “capstone project” at the end of a degree. But along the way, you have to master sub tasks and small skills in order to build on them later to accomplish lofty goals. So you need to learn the basics first. But AI is really good at helping you cheat on the basics without learning. So we still need to get them to the point of being able to use AI intelligently
Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.
> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?

Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI.

AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production.

AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote a service that could accomplish the same thing instead. Being able to get more contact with reality, and seeing how solutions actually work before committing to them, gives you a lot of information to make better decisions.

But then you still need good practices like code review, maintaining coding standards, and good project management to really keep code quality high. AI doesn’t really change that.

> Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue.

AI helps people more that "write" (i.e. generate) low-quality code than people who write high-quality code. This means AI will lead to a larger percentage of new code being low-quality.

> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

This will _never_ happen. Output will increase and quality will decrease.

that is what they do in the software industry, before it was let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year, interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior