This person is LARPing as a CS major on 4chan
It's not possible to write functional code without understanding it, even with ChatGPT's help.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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You would think eventually some of it would sink in. I mean I use LLMs to write code all the time but it’s very rarely 100% correct, often with syntax errors or logic problems. Having to fix that stuff is an excellent way to at least learn the syntax.
U underestimate the power of the darkside, how powerful ctrl+c ctrl+v is young padawan
Unless they're being physically watched or had their phone sequestered away, they could just pull it up on a phone browser and type it out into the computer. But if they want to be a programmer they really should learn how to code.
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deserved to fail
Probably promoted to middle management instead
He might be overqualified
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers
Relevant quote
Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s commit at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.
"Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we're trading long term strength for short term productivity. We're optimizing for today's pyramid at the cost of tomorrow's ability."
Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you'll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver's mechanical advantage.
By analogy, if you're using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can't lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn't fit under a particular rock or whatever.
"If my grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. We are optimizing today's grandmas at the sacrifice of tomorrow's eco friendly transportation."
If you don't understand how a lever works, then it's a problem. Should we let any person with an AI design and operate a nuclear power plant?
I like the sentiment of the article; however this quote really rubs me the wrong way:
I’m not suggesting we abandon AI tools—that ship has sailed.
Why would that ship have sailed? No one is forcing you to use an LLM. If, as the article supposes, using an LLM is detrimental, and it's possible to start having days where you don't use an LLM, then what's stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you're not using an LLM at all?
I personally don't interact with any LLMs, neither at work or at home, and I don't have any issue getting work done. Yeah there was a decently long ramp-up period — maybe about 6 months — when I started on ny current project at work where it was more learning than doing; but now I feel like I know the codebase well enough to approach any problem I come up against. I've even debugged USB driver stuff, and, while it took a lot of research and reading USB specs, I was able to figure it out without any input from an LLM.
Maybe it's just because I've never bought into the hype; I just don't see how people have such a high respect for LLMs. I'm of the opinion that using an LLM has potential only as a truly last resort — and even then will likely not be useful.
Why would that ship have sailed?
Because the tools are here and not going anyway
then what's stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you're not using an LLM at all?
The actually useful shit LLMs can do. Their point is that using only majorly an LLM hurts you, this does not make it an invalid tool in moderation
You seem to think of an LLM only as something you can ask questions to, this is one of their worst capabilities and far from the only thing they do
Not even. Every time someone lets AI run wild on a problem, they're trading all trust I ever had in them for complete garbage that they're not even personally invested enough in to defend it when I criticize their absolute shit code. Don't submit it for review if you haven't reviewed it yourself, Darren.
Hey that sounds exactly like what the last company I worked at did for every single project 🙃
This guy's solution to becoming crappier over time is "I'll drink every day, but abstain one day a week".
I'm not convinced that "that ship has sailed" as he puts it.
Capitalism is inherently short-sighted.
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I don't think you can memorize how code works enough to explain it and not learn codding.
I'm pretty sure chatgpt just tells you how it works, so they probably just memorized what it said.
You'd think that, but I believe you are underestimating people's ability to mindlessly memorize stuff without learning it.
It's what we're trained to do throughout our education system.
I have a hard time getting mad about it considering it's what we told them to do from a very young age.
It's super easy to learn how algorithms and what not work without knowing the syntax of a language. I can tell you how a binary search tree works, but I have no clue how to code it in Java because I've never used Java.
And similarly, i could read code in a language I dont know, understand what it does and how it works even if I don't know the syntax well enough to write it myself
Yeah, exactly. At least any fairly modern language. I don't think I could just pick up assembly and read it without the class I took. Heck, I don't think I could read it anymore now that it's been several years since that class.
I mean same, but you can look to the official docs for like what a loop or queue looks like
Not during a test. But maybe in those 20 hours they have.
I'm a full stack polyglot and tbh I couldn't program in some languages without reference docs / LLM even though I ship production code in those language all the time. Memorizing all of the function and method names and all of the syntax/design pattern stuff is pretty hard especially when it's not really needed in contemporary dev.
Yeah a doctor has to read up on a disease in a book when they encounter it. Completely normal
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Why would you sign up to college to willfully learn nothing
To get the peice of paper that lets you access a living wage
A lot of kids fresh out of highschool are pressured into going to college right away. Its the societal norm for some fucking reason.
Give these kids a break and let them go when they're really ready. Personally I sat around for a year and a half before I felt like "fuck, this is boring lets go learn something now". If i had gone to college straight from highschool I would've flunked out and just wasted all that money for nothing.
My Java classes at uni:
Here's a piece of code that does nothing. Make it do nothing, but in compliance with this design pattern.
When I say it did nothing, I mean it had literally empty function bodies.
Mine were actually useful, gotta respect my uni for that. The only bits we didn't manually program ourselves were the driver and the tomcat server, near the end of the semester we were writing our own Reflections to properly guess the object type from a database query.
Yeah that's object oriented programming and interfaces. It's a shit to teach people without a practical example but it's a completely passable way to do OOP in industry, you start by writing interfaces to structure your program and fill in the implementation later.
Now, is it a good practice? Probably not, imo software design is impossible to get right without iteration, but people still use this method... good to understand why it sucks
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run it in a vm
Java is literally easy bro tf is there to stress about...
He should be grateful. I hear programming interviews are pretty similar, as in the employer provides the code, and will pretty much watch you work it in some cases. Rather be embarrassed now than interview time. I'm honestly impressed he went the entire time memorizing the code enough to be able to explain it, and picked up nada.
He probably couldn't explain it well if he didn't know how to code at all imo
I'm honestly impressed he went the entire time memorizing the code enough to be able to explain it, and picked up nada.
Or he asked the LLM to summarise it and memorised that.
Been a TA when chatGPT was released. Most students shot their own foot this way before we figured what was happening. Grades went from bell shaped to U shaped. A few students got 85+, the rest failed, it was brutal. Thought I failed my students horribly before I found out it was happening in all classes.
If you actually stuck in such a situation, solve as many problems as you can. An approach that will work for most people:
- Try to solve
- Fail
- Take a peek, understand your failure. If the peek didn't include full solution, go back to step 1. Else continue to step 4.
- Move to the next question and go back to step 1.
Make sure to skip questions if they are too easy. Evey 4~ hours take a 20 minutes nap (not longer than 25 minutes). If you actually manage to solve enough problems to pass, go to sleep, 4.5 hours or a longer multiplier of 1.5 hours.
After the exam go back and solve all homework yourself. DO NOT cram it, spread it or you will retain nothing long term.
Good luck.
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