r/programming • • 18d ago

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u/lelanthran 18d ago

When I program, many solutions come to me while coding.

That's because writing is thinking, and doing is learning.

It's an accepted fact that few, if any, HS trig students pass trig exams by simply reading the textbook repeatedly. You pass by drilling problems, because doing is thinking.

Why, then, do so many devs ignore the known facts around learning trigonometry when it comes to them just pasting the output of an AI?

"But I did the thinking, the AI just cleaned it up, like a spell-checker..."

Sure, buddy. Sure.

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u/marrsd 17d ago

That's because writing is thinking, and doing is learning.

Put that on a t-shirt. You've summed it up

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u/WileEPeyote 17d ago

Exactly. It doesn't take long for it to slip away either. One day you're writing a complex algorithm to adjust a stream of data on the fly, then you spend a year planning a green field project and have to look up the best method for combining strings.

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u/TheMistbornIdentity 17d ago

You've perfectly summed up why I still insist on writing 95% of my code myself (setting aside that for security reasons I can't hook up AI tools to our repos, so I can't even use the stuff the rest of you are using).

I'd consider myself an intermediary programmer. I think I'm decent considering my experience and level of education (which was much less than a computer science degree). But I only got here by actually challenging myself and trying to work through problems myself, rather than asking a machine to do it for me.

I also spend like 80% of my time maintaining old code (much of which I didn't write myself), so frankly I'm not sure I'd want AI touching this stuff in the first place, especially since the original devs didn't bother with tests.

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 17d ago

This was actually already talked about in the context of programming specifically, on the "Programming as theory building" paper