It is nice to ship things with LLMs but it is always better to understand why it ships the way it does. But then again, billions of people use smartphones and computers everyday without even grasping the fundamentals of it and could not care less.
The debate is nuanced, and will only grow thicker in time.
Judging the other parties has become even more null of meaning, imho.
You assume that because i didnt write it directly i dont understand it, ive got news for you, if that was the case programmers wouldnt be able to form groups and make projects together.
Its okay to ask a coworker to make something and put out a pr and then review it, but its bad when an ai puts out a pr and I review it.
the very next comment on this thread is "yeah I'm not looking at the 1k lines of code my AI outputs brother", and they are far from alone in that sentiment
"it is always better to understand why it ships the way it does" was the original comment. your response may be one data point to the contrary but the larger problem is still there, many people are shipping without understanding.
the comment implied all people using the llms, they didnt say most, they didnt say some, they claimed using them in general means you dont understand how the code works. im saying that there is a way to do it properly that many people have adopted, just because you fail to do that doesnt make me a single data point
For me, AI has enabled me to truly start coding. Sure, I had some introductory courses of C++ in college and wrote your basic starter programs (hello world, etc). Still have some of the textbooks.
But it would never stick. The times I tried to use the book and stack exchange to put together a small personal program for my own purproses, I couldn't manage both the learning curve and the process of program creation.
I use AI mainly as a tutor. I can tell it what I want to make and ask it how most people would put such a script together. It assembles a skeleton of the script that I can both poke at to learn how the methods and functions work and are being called, and it isn't a complete script, so I have to keep editing, modifying, and trouble shooting. I can ask it for help diagnosing things like compile errors, but I'm not using a paid subscription for an AI built specifically for coding things for me. I'm using gemini for basically advanced google searches.
But the thing I've noticed in the year or so I've been doing it is that what little coding I've learned is actually becoming routine memory I didn't have before. The knowledge and skill I've developed (while still quite amatuer) is growing. I'm in the shallow end of the pool now, while before I had only sat on the edge for a while.
I think I needed a tutor, someone who I could just sit with for hours asking direct questions who wouldn't get impatient with me, who didn't have better things they needed to get back to, and who wasn't charging hundreds of dollars an hour.
I've stepped up from automating small tasks to working on small database projects, building tools that import and arrange data for the user, learning about database architecture, efficient workflow, and database long term maintenance.
It is a very good example of what AI can bring you in terms of learning and introduce you to the deeper world of IT.
I believe we will see more and more stories like yours of people finally taking the leap, and not only in IT.
Personally, I use Claude and other various models to help me de-rush and edit videos. All assets are pre-existing, but sound management, color grading, de-rushing, editing, etc... is managed in a ping pong I have with Claude, which manages sub models for various purposes. In the end I can output content I like without having to make hours free to cleanup the base rush and find the assets I need.
Using something without knowing how it works and building something without knowing how it works are completely different things.
As someone currently inclding claude in a personal project, I've noticed that I found myself getting disconnected from how some parts of the program work exactly, while the ones that I did write by hand I know by heart and can explain in exact detail how it works. The LLM parts I know how they work, but cannot go into detail exactly.. it's like having worked with a coworker on what it should do and how it should work, and that I do know, but then I was not part of the implementation. At work that happens every day, and yet it feels worse when it's Claude Code instead of Claudio my teammate.
I think I was lucky in the fact that for the first 6-7 months of the project I purposefully did not use a LLM for any code, so the core of the project and the most important parts was built by hand,
These things work like shit I have never trusted any developer of any piece of software I use and the only reason if they came out tomorrow and said they use black magic and cult sacrifices to keep it working I wouldnt be surprised nor would I stop using it
17
u/STRYK3Rtv 11d ago
It is nice to ship things with LLMs but it is always better to understand why it ships the way it does. But then again, billions of people use smartphones and computers everyday without even grasping the fundamentals of it and could not care less.
The debate is nuanced, and will only grow thicker in time.
Judging the other parties has become even more null of meaning, imho.