Comment by chrismorgan

3 days ago

I feel it’s important that this should be mentioned at least once in a thread like this: none. I choose to program the old-fashioned way, and do not anticipate this changing in the foreseeable future, and believe that I’ll cope just fine in my niche; and if it becomes commercially unviable, well, I may no longer be interested in the field anyway.

I won’t go into any details on why here, because that would make it too much about me. There have been plenty of discussions of reasons, trade-offs, &c. Plenty of people are rejecting this stuff, for a wide variety of reasons.

But one thing I will say: if I were teaching someone to program, I would actively discourage them entirely from using AI stuff, even though it will seem to help. (I mean someone that wants to learn programming, not someone that just wants results and is not interested in programming as such.)

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chrismorgan

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dv35z  3 days ago

Would you be open to share your "why's"? I would appreciate hearing diverse perspectives on this, and it sounds like you have experience and learnings which would be beneficial for us (at least me) to hear out. Thank you.

  • chrismorgan  2 days ago

    The thread has gone from the front page now, so I’ll share my summary of my personal reasons: https://chrismorgan.info/ai. As regards learning, I haven’t written anything down, and doing it justice would take longer than I am willing to spend now. It’s not exactly the same area, but <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U> is five minutes of expert testimony to the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on 2026-01-15 about the resoundingly negative consequences of tech in education. There’s plenty of other well-established research in adjacent areas, things like just how valuable handwriting is for memory retention. It has been established for a long time that struggle is intrinsically valuable for human accomplishment, in areas physical and mental. It’s barely even an extrapolation to say that relying on LLMs will hinder your deep learning (irony indeed). I have no doubt that some will be able to learn better or faster with them, if they use them in disciplined fashion, but even that will be difficult, for they are designed to be addictive, just as social media is. You’ll get going a lot more quickly, but the struggle is not the only thing you’ll lose.

    Humanly speaking, it truly is alarming what we’re doing to ourselves.