Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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"I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you"

I've been thinking about this for a full year now, and I'm ready to present my opinion: I think AI assistance makes it easier, not harder to get better at programming.

Sure, if you're lazy you won't learn anything because you'll get the AI to do all the work for you. But if you're that lazy I imagine you wouldn't have even tried to learn programming without access to AI assistance, so you're still doing better here!

If you're curious and dedicated to self-education, LLM assistance is a gift that never stops giving. You have to learn HOW to learn with it first, but once you've figured that out you can really fly with it.

I’m sure you feel like you’re getting better by working with an AI, but make sure to test your skills without any AI help.

The ”illusion of competence” effect can be really strong, and it sneaks up on you without you noticing it.

I am curious, why is this an illusion? I have experienced the same (or at least similar) feeling of getting better after getting my hands on a search engine like google. I never stopped using a search engine since then to check if I am suffering from this “illusion” you’re talking about. Should we?

I seriously suggest getting a book and typing out a listing totally from scratch. It's interesting to actually type out another person's style of solving a problem because not only is it alien feeling to "solve it that way", it's also interesting to physically solve it that way. I did this recently and was surprised to see myself solving the problem "that way" at work. It was much more elegant and more readable than what the AI was suggesting.

What was the book?

https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Highly recommend it. Very much.

Thanks! I'd heard good things, I really should spend some time with that.

I'm sure you think you're getting better at programming by using a compiler, but make sure you test your skills by writing assembly without the compiler.

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