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Comment by rphv | Hacker News Reader

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

In 2023, "Getting betting at programming" means learning how to use an AI.

Offloading the use of your brain to proprietary and legally murky third party services that can deny you access for any reason whatsoever seems shortsided. What happens when you don't have access to these services and you find out you don't actually know how to do most of what you need to do?

Or, get a head start using the murkiness and by the time the AIs are as common as smartphones and run well on local chips, you’re ahead of the pack.

And risk all of your work being owned by some entity you have no hopes of fighting against and being left with nothing to show for but an atrophied brain because you've offloaded all your thinking to a machine that doesn't belong to you and is not able to be audited.

What is to stop the owners of these ai systems from denying service to users for trying to make a product that competes with them? Or just straight up taking your work and using it themselves?

Why risk it?

You still need to be basically literate to understand what you're doing, otherwise you're adding zero value. Making AI tools solve problems for you means you're not learning how to solve those problems. It's especially problematic when you don't have a clue about what you're doing and you just take the AI at its word.

I think you still have to be pretty good at programming in order to bend a gpt to your will and produce a novel program. That's the current standoff. Might remain this way for a long time.

I strongly disagree, I believe that it's likely someone who has never ever programmed would be able to solve multiple advent of code tasks using GPT-[x] models and some copy/pasting and retries, and I'm 100% convinced that a poor programmer (i.e. not "pretty good at programming" but has some knowledge) can do so.

I think it would be entertaining to watch them try. It's going to spit out so many bugs and misunderstandings. Ready the popcorn moment for me.

If someone actually does that, please link the video here, I would watch that so much…

That's a good phrase "learning how to use an AI", indeed it's not just "using an AI". It's also a process and it involves learning or knowing how to code.

Maybe this will be true in 2030, but in 2023 AIs can help you quickly get off the ground in unfamiliar domains but expert knowledge (or just being knowledgeable enough to write code) is still king.

That is. If your goal is to quickly get out a prototype that may or may not work (even though you don't understand it very well), using AIs is great. But if you want to improve as a programmer, it may not be the best (or only) path.

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