They’re clever. Cheaters, uh, find a way.
Brainless GPT coding is becoming a new norm on uni.
Even if I get the code via Chat GPT I try to understand what it does. How you gonna maintain these hundreds of lines if you dont know how does it work?
Not to mention, you won’t cheat out your way on recruitment meeting.
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers
Relevant quote
Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s commit at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.
Hey that sounds exactly like what the last company I worked at did for every single project 🙃
“Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we’re trading long term strength for short term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s pyramid at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.”
Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you’ll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver’s mechanical advantage.
By analogy, if you’re using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can’t lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn’t fit under a particular rock or whatever.
Also: assuming you know what the easy bits are before you actually have experience doing them is a recipe to end up training incorrectly.
I use plenty of tools to assist my programming work. But I learn what I’m doing and why first. Then once I have that experience if there’s a piece of code I find myself having to use frequently or having to look up frequently, I make myself a template (vscode’s snippet features are fucking amazing when you build your own snips well, btw).
I like the sentiment of the article; however this quote really rubs me the wrong way:
I’m not suggesting we abandon AI tools—that ship has sailed.
Why would that ship have sailed? No one is forcing you to use an LLM. If, as the article supposes, using an LLM is detrimental, and it’s possible to start having days where you don’t use an LLM, then what’s stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you’re not using an LLM at all?
I personally don’t interact with any LLMs, neither at work or at home, and I don’t have any issue getting work done. Yeah there was a decently long ramp-up period — maybe about 6 months — when I started on ny current project at work where it was more learning than doing; but now I feel like I know the codebase well enough to approach any problem I come up against. I’ve even debugged USB driver stuff, and, while it took a lot of research and reading USB specs, I was able to figure it out without any input from an LLM.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve never bought into the hype; I just don’t see how people have such a high respect for LLMs. I’m of the opinion that using an LLM has potential only as a truly last resort — and even then will likely not be useful.
Why would that ship have sailed?
Because the tools are here and not going anyway
then what’s stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you’re not using an LLM at all?
The actually useful shit LLMs can do. Their point is that using only majorly an LLM hurts you, this does not make it an invalid tool in moderation
You seem to think of an LLM only as something you can ask questions to, this is one of their worst capabilities and far from the only thing they do
Because the tools are here and not going anyway
Swiss army knives have had awls for ages. I’ve never used one. The fact that the tool exists doesn’t mean that anybody has to use it.
The actually useful shit LLMs can do
Which is?
The bullshit is that anon wouldn’t be fsked at all.
If anon actually used ChatGPT to generate some code, memorize it, understand it well enough to explain it to a professor, and get a 90%, congratulations, that’s called “studying”.
I don’t think that’s true. That’s like saying that watching hours of guitar YouTube is enough to learn to play. You need to practice too, and learn from mistakes.
I don’t think that’s quite accurate.
The “understand it well enough to explain it to a professor” clause is carrying a lot of weight here - if that part is fulfilled, then yeah, you’re actually learning something.
Unless of course, all of the professors are awful at their jobs too. Most of mine were pretty good at asking very pointed questions to figure out what you actually know, and could easily unmask a bullshit artist with a short conversation.
You don’t need physical skills to program, there is nothing that needs to be honed in into the physical memory by repetition. If you know how to type and what to type, you’re ready to type. Of you know what strings to pluck, you still need to train your fingers to do it, it’s a different skill.
I didn’t say you’d learn nothing, but the second task was not just to explain (when you’d have the code in front of you to look at), but to actually write new code, for a new problem, from scratch.
Professors hate this one weird trick called “studying”
Yeah fake. No way you can get 90%+ using chatGPT without understanding code. LLMs barf out so much nonsense when it comes to code. You have to correct it frequently to make it spit out working code.
- Ask ChatGPT for a solution.
- Try to run the solution. It doesn’t work.
- Post the solution online as something you wrote all on your own, and ask people what’s wrong with it.
- Copy-paste the fixed-by-actual-human solution from the replies.
deserved to fail
I don’t think you can memorize how code works enough to explain it and not learn codding.
Been a TA when chatGPT was released. Most students shot their own foot this way before we figured what was happening. Grades went from bell shaped to U shaped. A few students got 85+, the rest failed, it was brutal. Thought I failed my students horribly before I found out it was happening in all classes.
If you actually stuck in such a situation, solve as many problems as you can. An approach that will work for most people:
- Try to solve
- Fail
- Take a peek, understand your failure. If the peek didn’t include full solution, go back to step 1. Else continue to step 4.
- Move to the next question and go back to step 1.
Make sure to skip questions if they are too easy. Evey 4~ hours take a 20 minutes nap (not longer than 25 minutes). If you actually manage to solve enough problems to pass, go to sleep, 4.5 hours or a longer multiplier of 1.5 hours.
After the exam go back and solve all homework yourself. DO NOT cram it, spread it or you will retain nothing long term.
Good luck.
Why would you sign up to college to willfully learn nothing
A lot of kids fresh out of highschool are pressured into going to college right away. Its the societal norm for some fucking reason.
Give these kids a break and let them go when they’re really ready. Personally I sat around for a year and a half before I felt like “fuck, this is boring lets go learn something now”. If i had gone to college straight from highschool I would’ve flunked out and just wasted all that money for nothing.
My Java classes at uni:
Here’s a piece of code that does nothing. Make it do nothing, but in compliance with this design pattern.
When I say it did nothing, I mean it had literally empty function bodies.
Because college is awesome and many employers use a degree as a simple filter any way
Not a single person I’ve worked with in software has gotten a job with just a diploma/degree since like the early 2000s
Maybe it’s different in some places.
We are saying the same thing. Degree > diploma for jobs. Go to college, get degree
I meant any form of qualification. Sure it helps, but the way you get the job is by showing you can actually do the work. Like a folio and personal projects or past history.
Any competent modern IDE or compiler will help you find syntax mistakes. Knowing the concepts is way more important.
Why do they even care? it’s not like your future bosses are going to give a flying fuck how you get your code. at least, they won’t until you cause the machine uprising or something.
They absolutely will. Companies hire programmers because they specifically need people who can code. Why would I hire someone to throw prompts into ChatGPT? I can do that myself. In the time it take me to write to an employee instructing them on the code I want them to create with ChatGPT, I could just throw a prompt into ChatGPT myself.
They are going to care if you can maintain your code. Programming isn’t “write, throw it over the fence and forget about it”, you usually have to work with what you - or your coworkers - have already done. “Reading other people’s code” is, like, 95% of the programmers job. Sometimes the output of a week long, intensive work is a change in one line of code, which is a result of deep understanding of a project which can span through many files, sometimes many small applications connected with each other.
ChatGPT et al aren’t good at that at all. Maybe they will be in the future, but at the moment they are not.
pay for school
do anything to avoid actually learning
Why tho?
Job
Losing the job after a month of demonstrating you don’t know what you claimed to is not a great return on that investment…
It is, because you now have the title on your resume and can just lie about getting fired. You just need one company to not call a previous employer or do a half hearted background check. Someone will eventually fail and hire you by accident, so this strategy can be repeated ad infinitum.
No actual professional company or job of value is not going to check your curriculum or your work history… So like sure you may get that job at quality inn as a night manager making $12 an hour because they didn’t fucking bother to check your resume…
But you’re not getting some CS job making $120,000 a year because they didn’t check your previous employer. Lol
Sorry, you’re not making it past the interview stage in CS with that level of knowledge. Even on the off chance that name on the resume helps, you’re still getting fired again. You’re never building up enough to actually last long enough searching to get to the next grift.
I am sorry that you believe that all corporations have these magical systems in place to infallibly hire skilled candidates. Unfortunately, the idealism of academia does not always transfer to the reality of industry.
…you stopped reading halfway through my comment didn’t you?
Idiot.
He should be grateful. I hear programming interviews are pretty similar, as in the employer provides the code, and will pretty much watch you work it in some cases. Rather be embarrassed now than interview time. I’m honestly impressed he went the entire time memorizing the code enough to be able to explain it, and picked up nada.
He probably couldn’t explain it well if he didn’t know how to code at all imo
