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Comment by oofsa | Hacker News Reader

The current AI may improve coder performance by only 5%, but it can improve non-coders' learning speed by 1000%.

Learning to code has become significantly easier because of ChatGPT, and many university students are already using it for learning. Not only can they let ChatGPT write boilerplate code, but they can also let ChatGPT write comments for code snippets they don't understand and explain unfamiliar syntax.

I wonder if coders can survive in a world where more and more people have coding skills. Edit: "majority" was not a good wording

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Majority having “coding” skills is not happening. Writing code is boring for majority. Why write code when you could be playing games and having fun on TikTok? There is your answer. We love writing code because we are nerds who love to solve complex problems. New kids who are not interested in writing code but using shortcuts to get code written for them by ChatGPT while not understanding it - is the least of our concerns. Let them have at it, but once they see the monoliths we tackle with at work - they will burnout on the spot. Cobol? Still alive and well. For a reason.

That's a bit of an uncharitable take on people with different interests. Some people who would find coding boring do instead enjoy things like teaching children, treating patients, putting out fires, making art, evaluating stocks, do research, or the millions of other things that humans do as a job or hobby. It's not just people spending time on TikTok.

I don't know about this, from my point of view to learn how to program you need to actually... program.

Trying stuff over and over again in different variations using maybe different languages, dealing with all the errors the frustration and overcoming them.

I think that using chat gpt or similar llms to learn how to code is similar to using Midjorney to learn how to draw.

Don't get me wrong you might be able to produce results fast but taking shortcuts is not going to speed up understanding.

It's going to be interesting to see this play out.

I personally am glad I learned to code without LLMs and think I would struggle with them. They let you get a lot done without understanding any of it, and then suddenly you hit a wall.

Also, I wonder how many people may choose not to learn to code in the first place, because they think it is about to be automated.

Imagine an organization that once depended on 10 million lines of code, now depends on 10 billion lines of code.

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