The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer.
Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)
In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening
No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.
So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence.
if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts.
which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time).
i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely.
just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later.
mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff.
> Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication?
yes.
If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like.
Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental.
The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.
LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf.
Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.
Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely.
They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task.
So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile.
And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.
Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).
Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
Anyhow in the caliban books the police robot could consider unethical and immoral things, and even contemplate harming humans, but it made it work really slow, almost tiring it.
Not only that, still very far away from being good enough. An opinionated AI trying to convince me his way of doing things is the one true way and my way is not the right way, that's the stuff of nightmares.
Give it a few years and when it is capable of coding a customized and full-featured clone of Gnome, Office, Photoshop, or Blender, then we are talking.