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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Maybe 40 years ago there were programmers that would not work with anyone that use IDEs or automated memory management. When presented with a programming task that requires these things and you're WITHOUT your IDE or whatever, they will fall apart.

Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a good argument, because lets be honest, it likely will. This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

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> This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.

You are also likely to be more vulnerable to financial mishaps and scams.

A lot of developers of my generation (30+) learned to program within a code editor and compile their project in command line. Remove the IDE and we can still code.

On the other hand my master 2 students, most of which learned scripting in the previous year, can't even split a project in multiple files after being explained multiple times. Some have more knowledge and ability than others, but a signifiant fraction is just copy-pasting LLM output to solve whatever is asked from them instead of trying to do it themselves, or asking questions.

I think the risk isn't just that LLMs won't exist, but that they will fail at certain tasks that need to get done. Someone who is highly dependent on prompt engineering and doesn't understand any of the underlying concepts is going to have a bad time with problems they can't prompt their way out of.

This is something I see with other tools. Some people get highly dependent on things like advanced IDE features and don't care to learn how they actually work. That works fine most of the time but if they hit a subtle edge case they are dead in the water until someone else bails them out. In a complicated domain there are always edge cases out there waiting to throw a wrench in things.

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