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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

In theory this should be good for students learning to code. In practice, I feel like it's just another layer of crap for them to be overwhelmed by.

If the user can understand the answers given, they could have trivially done the work themselves without faffing around with a chat bot.

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I remember learning Photoshop, 3DS Max, and Solid Works in high school. All of them were so overwhelming because they were built for the pros and had hundreds of features front and centre.

I’m reminded of video games that slowly unlock all your abilities over the first few hours. Maybe, somehow, complicated applications can start off simple and as you go and get the various tools, perhaps from a command palate where each tool is very rich in alias names, they find homes in your UI.

Maybe this will sound bizarre, but in high school, we were taught Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.0 by being given a thick beige binder and a set of floppy disks. There was barely an interface. We had to figure it out by flipping through dead trees and learning key combinations.

The best is when we discovered the keyboard overlay. No more memorization!

you might've seen it because it pops up on HN from time to time, but https://thonny.org/ is a python IDE for learners that works more or less like this

When I first tried ChatGPT, I thought it could really take my job. In a day, it's clear that I need to already know what I want and at most it saves time on basic boilerplate or suggests new syntax.

It is until you encounter edge cases where it's hallucinating, eg. Suggesting postgresql functions that never existed.

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