Comment by derefr
6 days ago
So do the thing that a student copying their notes from the board does: look at the PR on one monitor, and write your own equivalent PR by typing the changes line-for-line into your IDE on the other. Pretend copy/paste doesn’t exist. Pretend it’s code you saw in a YouTube video of a PowerPoint presentation, or a BASIC listing from one of those 1980s computing magazines.
(And, if you like, do as TFA says and rephrase the code into your own house style as you’re transcribing it. It’ll be better for it, and you’ll be mentally parsing the code you’re copying at a deeper level.)
You still didn't have to build the mental model, understand the subtle tradeoffs and make the decisions that arrived at that design.
I'm amazed that people don't see this. Absolutely nobody would claim that copying a novel is the same thing as writing a novel.
I feel like the dismissal of mental models is a direct consequence on the tech industry's manaical focus on scale and efficiency as the end-all be-all values to optimize.
Nevermind other important values like resilience, adaptability, reliability, and scrutability. An AI writes a function foo() that does a thing correctly; who has the know-how that can figure out if foo() kills batteries, or under what conditions it could contribute to an ARP storm or disk thrashing, or what implicit hardware requirements it has?
Hunter S. Thompson claimed to have re-typed The Great Gatsby because he wanted to know what it feels like to write a great novel.
Apparently, he actually meant this as a somewhat serious piece of writing advice, but I still prefer my initial reading of it as sarcasm.
I am suspicious of this argument, because it would imply that you can’t understand the design intent / tradeoffs / etc of code written by your own coworkers.
Which: of course you can. Not least because both your coworkers and these coding agents produce changes with explanatory comments on any lines for which the justification or logic is non-obvious; but also because — AI PR or otherwise — the PR consists of commits, and those commits have commit messages further explaining them. And — AI submitter or otherwise — you can interrogate the PR’s submitter in the PR’s associated discussion thread, asking the submitter to justify the decisions made, explain parts you’re suspicious of, etc.
When you think about it, presuming your average FOSS project with an open contribution model, a PR from an AI agent is going to be at least strictly more “knowable” than a “drive-by” PR by an external one-time contributor who doesn’t respond to discussion-thread messages. (And sure, that’s a low bar — but it’s one that the average accepted and merged contribution in many smaller projects doesn’t even clear!)
You understand your coworkers' PRs as thoroughly and intuitively as they do? Any significant PR will contain things you don't even notice or think to ask about. And the answers to the questions you do ask are the end result of a thought process you didn't go through and therefore also don't understand as deeply.
Back to the novel analogy, you could ask an author why he incorporated this or that character trait or plot point, but all the explanation in the world will not make you able to write the next chapter as well as he could.
This is how a (video game) programming class in my high school was taught. You had to transcribe the code from a Digipen book.... then fix any broken code. Not entirely sure if their many typos were intentional, but they very much helped learn because we had no choice but to correct their logic failures and taypos to move onto the next section. I'm still surprised 20 years later how well that system worked to teach and push us to branch our understandings.
Yes, I was just about to say. Typing out code is a way to lear syntax of a new language and it’s often recommended to not copy paste while you start learning.
Is this just repeating labor? Why not just write it all yourself in the first place if you are just going to need to copy it over later?