Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsoles | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.

Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

View on HN

I recently had the opportunity to help teach to almost graduate students, (even though I graduated only last year myself), and with the main teacher we made it a point to do a skim code review with ever single one of the 90 students, just me/the teacher, them, and their code on the computer screen.

I saw every category, the ones that used AI to learn and actually answered my questions and knew what it wrote, the ones that mostly didn't use AI and so knew what they wrote, and finally the ones that used AI to do the assignment instead of learning and always responded a variant of "I don't know".

I really like what the other teacher said to a student that admitted never reading their code:

"I'm not even scolding you, You're literally saying you are completely unnecessary here"

One of the most important things for any profession is experience. Experience comes from learning from your own mistakes or those of others. Those with the best skills can be said to have learned a lot from previous mistakes.

So, how can someone become professional if they don’t learn from their own mistakes? In the case of AI; they will learn to become professional prompters and learn from the mistakes of bad prompts??? I prefer the former not the ladder.

I think the calculator parallel is really on point.

You learn math before using a calculator to do the boring part.

You should learn code before using an AI to generate the boring part.

Even more so for LLMs because they are not deterministic like calculators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com