Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

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> Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

I don't feel this is a strong argument, since these are the sort of things that one could easily lookup on stackoverflow, github, and so on for a while now. What "AI" did was being a more convenient code search tool + text manipulation abilities.

But you still need to know the fundamentals, otherwise won't even know what to ask. I recently used GPT to get a quick code sample for a linear programming solution, and it saved me time looking up the API for scipy... but I knew what to ask for in the first place. I doubt GPT would suggest that as a solution if I described the problem in too high level.

Don't forget there were lots of things that are in standard libraries now that didn't use to exist back when I was coding in C in the 1990's. Nobody really writes their own sorting algorithm anymore -- and nobody should write their own A* algorithm either.

Honestly though, I recently asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet to write a python script to upload ssh keys to a mikrotik router, to prompt for the username and password -- etc. And it did it. I wouldn't say I loved the code -- but it worked. Code was written in more of a golang format, but okay. It's fine and readable enough. Hiring a contractor from our usual sources would have taken a week at least, probably by the time you add up the back and forth with code reviews and bugs.

I think for a lot of entry level positions (particularly in devops automation say), AI can effectively replace them. You'd still have someone supervise their code and do code reviews, but now the human just supervises an AI. And that human + AI combo replaces 3 other humans.

Those are the sorts of things you're supposed to struggle with in school though.

If students are using AI now, that is indeed the same thing as looking up solutions on Stack Overflow or elsewhere. It's cheating for a grade at the expense of never developing your skills.

Stackoverflow could help answer specifically targeted questions about how thigns worked, or suggest areas of debugging. They couldn't/wouldn't take a direct question from an assignment and provide a fully working answer to it.

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