Hacker News Reader

Full thread

gonzalohm

The article opens with

> Writing requires thinking, don't let an AI do the thinking for you.

And then the author goes on to admit that they use AI for coding. Does coding not require thinking or what?

I agree that we shouldn't be delegating thinking to AI, but stopping at writing seems disingenuous.

View on HN

> Does coding not require thinking or what?

Code is deterministic, and language is not. If I write:

total = 0 for x in [1, 2, 3]: total += x

…nobody is going to argue with me that “total” is anything but 7.

But language is different. What you perceive and what I perceive from the written word can be completely different (e.g https://youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo&ra=m )

That's not the argument in the article. Not only that but coding is deterministic up to a certain point. Once the project becomes complex, it becomes harder and harder to account for all edge cases. Sometimes it requires heuristics that are not deterministic, etc. There are infinite ways to implement the same requirements.

That argument is like saying that weather is deterministic. It is if you know every single variable, but that's impossible.

Yes but on the sliding scale of how deterministic is this task- writing, not very. coding, can execute and write some tests (even if gamed/bad).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com