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f311a | on: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
You 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.

smallstepforman | parent | next
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.

ListeningPie | parent | next
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.

TheOtherHobbes | root | parent | next
No one seriously expects a food critic to be able to cook a Michelin-starred meal. The job of that kind of critic is to be insightful and entertaining, and it's very different to the taste required to create top quality food, which is a combination of solid technical skill and creative flair.

Taste in coding is a combination of insight, experience, native talent, technical skill, and flair. Tasteful coding produces clever but straightforward minimal elegant solutions that an average developer can't imagine but can adapt and maintain.

Der_Einzige | root | parent
If critics were forced to be actually skilled at the craft of creation, the world would be infinitely better off. Both the cello and the player are better off by the cello maker also finally being the cello player. Alienation was a mistake and this part Marx of all people understood well.

This is why "critical thinking" is a meme. Being a critic takes no skill. I want far fewer critics and far more constructive thinking. GenAI being the ultimate constructor is a bonus.

GoblinSlayer | root | parent
I'd say taste is a consequence of lifestyle, which is learned by doing. And art critics often have bad lifestyle, which is visible in their bad taste. When art is virtual life, it would define a lifestyle, which is adopted by doing, in its turn producing taste.
eueje | root | parent
Agreed.

Taste implicitly requires discipline of what one chooses to expose themself to and what not to.

adamcharnock | parent | next
> 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.

xiaoyu2006 | parent
Exactly. Repeating or rephrasing a definition is trivial, teaching someone is not.