Comment by mewpmewp2
3 days ago
I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding?
It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget?
Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim.
My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the same thing at the same time, how to understand their weaknesses and strengths, how to automate all of that. So there's definitely a lot of mental effort going into those things.
If you are not practicing an activity consistently, you'll forget some of the finer grained aspects. When I'm coding, I subconsciously create a continuous logic map. Having someone or something just generate (and generate so quickly) destroys that and makes it easier for bugs to slip through.
I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right?
You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it.
As in how could I possibly forget what loops, conditionals or functions are?
I haven't written code myself for 1+ year (because AI does it), but I feel like I have forgot absolutely nothing, in fact I feel like I have learned more about coding, because I see what patterns AI uses vs what I did or people did, and I am able to witness different patterns either work out or not work out much faster in front of my eyes.
A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.
7 replies →
Coding is a thinking avtivity. What you’ll be missing is the nimbleness in doing that activity, not the knowledge.
So you may remember all your high school math, but not doing it every day, means you are slower than some of the students. So your knowledge of programming will be there, bit you will be slower because you no longer have the reflex that comes with doing things over and over.
5 replies →
If your internet died you would likely be worse at programming that you were in 2020. I think is what people are getting at.
I always compare AI programming to Google. If that's the case, then without internet, without Google, without Stack Overflow, my abilities would be worse than they were in 2000.
If my internet died in 2020 I would also be useless because probably I couldn't install/download all the libs/frameworks, etc.
But if I didn't need those things, and there was a simple pseudolang syntax which acted exactly the same in all versions, didn't have any breaking changes, I would argue I'd be much better at it now.
Internet, search etc is needed to understand how to setup libs/frameworks/APIs, but logic at itself isn't something that I could possibly forget. AI will help to get those setups quicker without me having to search, but arguably it's all useless information, that will get out of date, that I really don't even need to know. I don't need to know top of my head what the perfect modern tsconfig setup should look like or what is the best monorepo framework and how to set it up, so it would scalably support all different coding languages for different purposes.
I used to be an expert at php but now I haven’t written any in over a decade, I can still read it but it would take me a little while to get back to where I was (hopefully I’ll never need to), same thing could easily happen due to ai
The same way you can get weak if you don't use your muscles.