Comment by dimal
6 days ago
> a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from?
Well, if you’re a novice, don’t do that. I learn things from LLMs all the time. I get them to solve a problem that I’m pretty sure can be solved using some API that I’m only vaguely aware of, and when they solve it, I read the code so I can understand it. Then, almost always, I pick it apart and refactor it.
Hell, just yesterday I was curious about how signals work under the hood, so I had an LLM give me a simple example, then we picked it apart. These things can be amazing tutors if you’re curious. I’m insatiably curious, so I’m learning a lot.
Junior engineers should not vibe code. They should use LLMs as pair programmers to learn. If they don’t, that’s on them. Is it a dicey situation? Yeah. But there’s no turning back the clock. This is the world we have. They still have a path if they want it and have curiosity.
> Well, if you’re a novice, don’t do that.
I agree, and it sounds like you're getting great results, but they're all going to do it. Ask anyone who grades their homework.
Heck, it's even common among expert users. Here's a study that interviewed scientists who use LLMs to assist with tasks in their research: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713668
Only a few interviewees said they read the code through to verify it does what they intend. The most common strategy was to just run the code and see if it appears to do the right thing, then declare victory. Scientific codebases rarely have unit tests, so this was purely a visual inspection of output, not any kind of verification.
> Junior engineers should not vibe code. They should use LLMs as pair programmers to learn. If they don’t, that’s on them. Is it a dicey situation? Yeah. But there’s no turning back the clock. This is the world we have. They still have a path if they want it and have curiosity.
Except it's impossible to follow your curiosity when everything in the world is pushing against it (unless you are already financially independent and only programming for fun). Junior developers compete in one of the most brutal labor markets in the world, and their deliverables are more about getting things done on time than doing things better. What they "should" do goes out the window once you step out of privilege and look at the real choices.
You sound like an active learner who could become a top programmer even without LLMs. Most students will take the path of least resistance.
There is absolutely a thing where self-motivated autodidacts can benefit massively more from these new tools than people who prefer structured education.
Paradoxically, those self-motivated autodidacts will have to be without the stress and pressure of delivering things on time, and thus get largely limited to recreational programmers who don't have as much skin in the game in the first place.
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