Comment by godshatter
4 days ago
> An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.
This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes into AI and vibecoding and I'm not a big fan. Even in my boring job the actual coding is the part I like the most. So I've taken a different tack. I've been prompting Claude to teach me how to do things, and that has worked out really well. Some basic info to start with, specific questions as needed, but I'm doing the work. I'm improving my productivity while still learning new things and having fun. Win-win for me.
Gemini has been teaching me embedded Linux, and last year ChatGPT taught me C#. All on the free tiers mind you. But I'm doing the work, it's just faster to ask questions than to dig through mailing lists and source code.
At work though, the pressure to move fast is too high, so I'm letting Claude Code so more work these days (nowhere near the majority, but I've found things i can trust it with).
I don't think i could deal with a paid plan myself given how unpredictable the models are and opaque the pricing is.
I'm starting to do this at home, but the instinct to just do a web search is still there. I'm only using Claude Code at work because they are paying for it, so why not use it. I think I've used maybe 5% of my tokens for any given day so far. I need to pick a free AI and make it my goto AI mentor for what I want to learn.
Once I build a few things at work I'll probably be asking Claude Code to look for problems with what I've written, but we're not being pushed too hard to get into AI coding yet, though the writing is on the wall. I'm mostly looking for ways to expand what I can do within our current constraints, and keep my sanity.
That's why i love it for hobby projects: "man it sure would be great if the Linux kernel did this thing, if only i knew C... Oh right, the LLM knows C, i can make Linux do this even if i don't know how"
That's great. I don't care how it works, i just want the result for this specific personal project. Great. Whatever i learn about the kernel along the way is just icing.
At work, though, i NEED to know how it works, i need to be able to explain and defend it, i need to be able to expand on it. Sure if Claude Code can speed that up, great, but i can't just "let it rip" the way I might just prompt and pray with a hobby project.