Simplifying programming with AI-tutors
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That requires some basic knowledge, a specific mental model for interacting with LLM’s, and a modicum of good taste in code to be able to correct for the code smells that LLM’s fall victim to.
You can never let the LLM take the wheel, you need to be the driver knowing what you want. This works if for example you know how to something in language x but need it in language Y, but it doesn’t work if you have never been able to solve the problem before.
For something like leetcode however which is far from novel, there are that many correct answers in the training data that the risk is low.
I don't know why, but I find it easy to imagine a future where real programmers who understand both the craft and the art from its lowest fundamentals to the highest levels of abstraction are the equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel.
Yes, LLMs are okay-ish at javascript and python, but if I ask it to generate me some VHDL, it often just produces plain garbage. And without a basic understanding of hardware design you wouldn't even know what to look out for. It's just not possible to learn anything from it.
Often overlooked point. The only reason I even consider LLMs a useful tool for my work is because for the things I request from them I do have the prerequisites to validate their output.
Still useless for trying to understand subtle complex concepts not previously well-defined in the data sets.
The numerous slop articles posted on YC that obviously were partially written with LLM help often makes the alleged authors sound like they had a stroke. lol =3
I remain skeptical the current well-formatted LLM nonsense will help students, and have concerns it may cause hindrance with long-term information recall.
We shall soon see I guess... Best of luck, =3
The learning outcomes for students are often terrible for this path, but perhaps good if you charge for the tutorial service I guess. Attrition rates are not something institutions proudly promote in public.
YC seems to down-vote anything that deals with a data-driven reality. lol =3
In introductory and undergraduate academics, the departments will usually offer unstructured TA lab hours for those who seek additional help understanding material. However, the reality is "A" level students do not require good teachers, as their grades are usually not correlated with instructor proficiency (often due to a 3 year head start from out-of-band after-school tutoring services prior to the conclusion of grade school.)
The danger from LLM contaminating long-term memory recall from an erroneous primacy effect is a concern.
Have a nice day, =3
Little do they stop to consider the fact that most of the time they don't have an effing clue what they want until someone conceptualizes and builds it for them.
If I simply built what people asked for, as opposed to trying to understand their needs and problems, that would lead to very awkward situations once someone actually tried to use the system.
Very common acronym here in India. All CS "students" just want to "crack" "DSA".
I hate this terminology and more so the underlying idea and motivation behind doing all this.
That CS is a rote mechanical thing to do for the end goal of getting a job.
LLMs are most helpful for already-learned developers.
Learn from CS50, understand the fundamentals well.
Then use Cursor or LLMs heavily since you know what's going around.
Having the immediate aid of an LLM in a lot of ways also does hurt your reasoning capabilities in my experience. I'm curious how you would address this.
Just recently gave it a 80 line header-only C++20 code snippet to comment on. As first item, it concluded that my header should be split into a .hpp/.cpp combination. And it proceeded to take one of my template functions, and move the definition into the .cpp file... This is wrong, and broken. Because now, nobody can call that template.
And that is with gpt-4o, the latest flagship thingy... I am sure Claude users will now tell me their pet is more perfect.
Frankly, I think we are trying to beat a dead horse here. This is not helpful.
It's definitely much better than GPT-4o for most programming tasks, yes. And that's just the free version.
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In addition to quality materials, you get a personal tutor that can resolve all your unique doubts and help you code in LeetCode.
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Thanks :)
I did them because I’m an external examiner for CS students and when I stated I wanted to brush up on all the stuff you learn during your first years, but I was blown away with how good they were. It has been a long time since so maybe they’ve changed.
I’d worry about AI tutors considering how often they get things blatantly wrong. In our internal statistics and analytics on AI assisted programming it’s a very bad option for “junior” programmers. Basically it reduces productivity by quite a lot, it also produces a lot more pull request rejections due to really bad code. On the flip-side, things like co-pilot makes experts in their field of programming sooooo much more efficient. What is really worrying though, is when LLMs get explanations completely wrong. Which means they are teaching the actually engineering wrong, and it can be years before it gets “fixed” if it ever does. I’ve worked in plenty of places where people would never be challenged on wrong knowledge. Often because their co-workers simply didn’t know any better either.
There's been a study already. "AI" assisted beginners learned ... about nothing compared to the control beginners group. I think it was linked here on HN.
A LLM might help if it does not give you code but only answers short questions. Unless it's as good as those support chatbots.
That's half the fun!
can't say much about other sites.
GL with your course :)
Once it told me really nice beautiful soup optimization, I did not I could make cast soup to string, or something.
This is obviously done on my private code. Legality issues more often prohibits the use of AI