Programming Is Free | Hacker News Reader

Programming Is Free

idiallo.com

24 pointsnomdep6 comments

TBH I am scared for the young developers which are being tempted to not learn but use the AI. TBH I'd never learn to... Learn if I had this access to ominous entity, which does not guide me step by step, but rather tend to throw me the ready-made solution. I mean - people say "don't give a fish, give a fishing rod" but AI tend to slap me with fishes all the time. And while being a full grown developer I know what's there more or less, those younglings will not learn anything

I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.

Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.

If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).

We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.

Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.

Should short the stock market then

Adding to the original post, yes, a lot of things are free now. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of resources available on the internet. At the same time, many topics turn into deep rabbit holes if you look closely enough.

For example, I never realized how much there is to learn about something as simple as a bolt. To me, it was just a cylinder with helical grooves. Then I watched the video “Life of Bolts” on YouTube and was amazed by the number of steps and processes required to manufacture a high-precision, high-performance bolt for a Formula 1 car. Another eye-opening moment was watching “Origin of Precision.” It completely changed the way I look at everyday objects.

Once I started digging deeper into bolts, I discovered how many fields are connected to making them: materials science, process engineering, manufacturing engineering, metrology, precision engineering, and more. I have even come across PhD theses focused on bolts, O-rings, and seals. One time I found a technical paper on O-ring modeling from NASA’s technical server, and it was full of complex partial differential equations. It honestly surprised me how much knowledge and effort go into designing and producing things that seem so simple.

It makes me realize that the biggest bottleneck in learning anything deeply is mathematics. At the same time, you also need some philosophical grounding to ask the right questions, along with the willingness to learn and apply knowledge in the real world.

Judgement is also free, apparently. Kids these days, amirite?

YouTube is an amazing place to learn new skills and if you want to learn how professionals deploy code, a peek behind the AWS curtain can be very helpful even if it is too expensive for your toy website.

I think the author misses the point. He's seen boasting, and with not enough understanding of problems of the modern generation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com