alt Hacker NewsYou can ask LLMs about high-level techniques, and their answers will usually be good enough. What you can't get from LLMs is the taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years.
High-level techniques were never a problem. You could Google tens of articles on this topic. They are useless too, it's like learning how to drive a racing bicycle from reading a book. Sure, you will know a lot about nuances, but you will fail miserably when it comes to a real race.
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taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years.
I disagree, the definers of taste; art and food critics, movie and book reviewers, don’t need to have learned the craft by doing. Taste is a separate skill.
> which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years.
I hope this isn’t the case. It is the route I took, but it also doesn’t seem to be a likely route going forward. Strong CS grounding is feasible for sure, but I have a hard time believing that a meaningful number of people will be spending the requisite years coding manually.
Exactly. Repeating or rephrasing a definition is trivial, teaching someone is not.
The other day I just wanted to loop through characters in a std::string to copy data to a new string with a few escape characters (sending to peripheral device). Simple enough task for AI. I got a coroutine monstrocity back, with copies to std::array and a range based iterator, since I specified C++23. If I specified C++11, I would have received a: char p = src.data(); while (p) { … p++; }
I had the experience to keep calling out AI to simplify and downgrade the solution to something primitive, which ended up smaller, faster, easier to maintain. Juniors with real world experience would not bother, they’ll take the first working AI result.