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Comment by senectus1 | Hacker News Reader

So here is, for me, and interesting philosophical question...

I have a 14 yr old son that has been teaching himself to code in c# and c++ He's also learning rudimentary coding at school (though he's way ahead of them)

Do I show him ChatGPT? In doing so will he get lazy, and not learn anything anymore, could he use it to "cheat" on his school assignments?

Am I better off not showing him this tool or am i depriving him of the ability to stand on the shoulders of digital giants?

I honestly don't know where i stand on this.

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If you allow him to Google for results, why wouldn't you allow him to use ChatGPT?

So far ChatGPT has not given me any spam or advertising or malware!

That said, I saw a programmer comment earlier that they had spent hours unsuccessfully trying to solve a software problem in an area they understood, then they asked ChatGPT and it solved it correctly . . . the tone of the comment was rather deflated.

ChatGPT is way way better at many writing tasks than I am, but I try to not let my ego be dented. Should my ego be more threatened by ChatGPT, but not threatened by the existing translation tools (or Dall-E) which are similarly magical?

I don't think you can get too lazy by using chatGPT to help with coding. For simple stuff it usually gets it right and you can just copy-paste the code without thinking. Not that much different from just copy-pasting code from StackOverflow. Most IDEs can already auto-complete boilerplate code. chatGPT just does it better and faster.

But if it makes a mistake or you want a more complex program, you'll be forced to debug and learn how things actually work. It's also often confidently wrong in explanations, with errors and mistakes that are obvious to anyone who knows the subject well, or that don't hold up in the real world.

TL:DR; chatGPT is currently only useful for use-cases that should be automated anyway (simple programming tasks and boilerplate code), doing much more than that requires an understanding that chatGPT can't hand-wave away.

If you are making toys for personal use, sure. Any professional software developer who just pastes code without thinking is basically committing professional malpractice. And that includes anything from StackOverflow. And what better way to find yourself without a job than to exercise no code review and use no supervisory intelligence?

What do you mean "by do I show him ChatGPT?". He'll eventually find about it by himself.

I worry about him using it as a shortcut and not learning properly.

Shit I just realised I sound like my parents when I was his age...

I think I'm in the wrong now.

honestly im a junior dev and I think if I use it it’ll make me lazy.

There’s a lot of value in learning how to read documentation and finding the information you need yourself.

When you’re starting out at this I think the worst is when you’re in the muck, making it out of these situations with ChatGPT i think will take away some of the positives of getting out that.

At this point what is more impressive completing his hw assignments or learning how to program, being intentional.

Let him do whatever keeps him interested in the topic. By following his own path, he will be more likely to stick with it.

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