Hacker News Reader

Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

When I started programming, I didn’t have an AI to help me.

I wrote a lot of spaghetti and I confused myself a lot. And it was a lot of fun.

I think the doomsayers ITT are wrong. I think you’ve forgotten what it was like to go from “how do you even make a program” to “I put something on the screen and it’s amazing that I did that”.

I think AI will help a lot of people get over the bump from not even comprehending how software works, to putting something on their screen and evolving their skills from there.

Who cares if they make some spaghetti along the way. That’s necessary for learning. AI or not.

View on HN

> get over the bump

You call learning, making mistakes and fixing them, and improving "a bump"? That's the whole point.

> That’s necessary for learning

You haven't learned anything in the end. I read a lot of programming books in the past thinking I would be a computer god at the end, and I realized I learned nothing because "I did nothing" exactly like what we have with ChatGPT.

> evolving their skills from there

What skills? If you are just asking a computer for what you want you're not developing any skills, apart from maybe how to describe your requirements better†.

If you take the code the LLM outputs and use that as a basis to be able to write your own code I would call that "learning to program" and I applaud it whether you learn from adapting LLM code or by reading K&R cover-to-cover before you even touch a keyboard. But that's not what this article describes—what this article describes is the very deliberate act of not learning anything.

†Technically just describing your requirements in a way the particular LLM you're using responds best to, which is not necessarily "better" in an objective sense.

Everyone knows that copy pasting code without understanding it is exactly how you don't learn. Every programming class you're in has an underperforming student that does exactly this. Than they barely graduate, get interviewed, and they're somehow worse than the bootcamp grads.

Cursor is that, but prompted by you instead of a stackoverflow question.

You're 1000% underestimating the experience of learning it yourself vs just getting info shot right into your brain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com