Comment by mgraczyk
6 days ago
Deliberate practice, which may take a form different from productive work.
I believe it's important for students to learn how to write data structures at some point. Red black trees, various heaps, etc. Students should write and understand these, even though almost nobody will ever implement one on the job.
Analogously electrical engineers learn how to use conservation laws and Ohm's law to compute various circuit properties. Professionals use simulation software for this most of the time, but learning the inner workings is important for students.
The same pattern is true of LLMs. Students should learn how to write code, but soon the code will write itself and professionals will be prompting models instead. In 5-10 years none of this will matter though because the models will do nearly everything.
I agree with all of this. But it's already very difficult to do even in a college setting -- to force students to get deliberate practice, without outsourcing their thinking to an LLM, you need various draconian measures.
And for many professions, true expertise only comes after years on the job, building on the foundation created by the college degree. If students graduate and immediately start using LLMs for everything, I don't know how they will progress from novice graduate to expert, unless they have the self-discipline to keep getting deliberate practice. (And that will be hard when everyone's telling them they're an idiot for not just using the LLM for everything)
You're talking about students, but the question was about seniors. You don't go to school to become a senior dev, you code in real-world settings, with real business pressures, for a decade or two to become a senior. The question is how are decent students supposed to grow into seniors who can independently evaluate AI-produced code if they are forced to use the magic box and accept its results before being able to understand them?
I was talking about students because I was replying to a comment from a professor talking about his students