[guywithahat]

I wonder about this. One would think new programmers, like old, will learn through experience to care most about the things that matter, and ignore things that don’t. In 10 years my pre-AI experience may condition me to waste time thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care

[cdkmoose]

I think the problem will be that there was only so much we could do wrong while we were learning 15+ years ago and our mentors had a reasonable scope to watch around us as we learned. People learning now can get a coding agent to build the entire system for them and it is much harder for the mentor to review that work.

My concern is how much damage could be done by someone learning 15+ years ago vs someone learning now.

[asveikau]

> thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care

That particular ship sailed more than 15 years ago. Back then if you asked people trained on high level GC-based languages about low level details or memory allocation, they wouldn't know.

[guywithahat]

I do a lot of embedded C++ work and byte stream work where packing matters, but I agree with you. For most development it’s irrelevant, and in the future I expect it to be even less relevant.

[contextfree]

But I feel like over the last ~10 years there's been a trend back towards learning more about them (e.g., with Rust and new C# features, or with C++ Win32 programming becoming a cool hipster thing somehow)? Or maybe that's just my own personal bubble.

[devin]

If you have to care about this stuff, then you do. I think it’s that simple.