Comment by cheesecakegood
5 days ago
I’ve long been curious what you (and a lot of people that express this) feel the cutoff is to know how to code? Because obviously there’s a sliding scale between truly knowing very little, being able to adapt similar work, extensive modifications, coding everything from scratch, etc. on top of understanding certain programming concepts and organization.
Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only.
For context to my above comment re university course. The final project we had to do was make a very rudimentary room reservation server/client on the terminal. Java, however you wanted to store the data was fine, TCP sockets were the parameters given.
It took me all of a week to finish it. Lots struggled to even begin. We were given 10 weeks.
I didn’t know much then but I read the docs and figured it out.
> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line.
Wasn't the workflow there always to take the example code of whatever library or framework it was and then customize it?
I could definitely never start a react or android or c# or whatever application from scratch with no resources. Nor would I want to because why.
Works with C I guess though. Given that the contract is so small.
But that also breaks down the moment you want to write C for some uC, and then there's tons of boilerplate again you just pull from the sdk example.
Yeah, not the one you are responding to, but I wouldn't define it as from scratch.
Personally, "know how to code" is basically having the logic an reasoning skills to read and understand and apply documentation for whatever subject you need for this job.
If you have never written a web app in your life, but you can follow next.js tutorials and customize them beyond the tutorials afterwards, then you're at the point where the only thing you need is more time or more docs based on what you need to do at work.
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> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI
If companies would start hiring people who are fully experienced and qualified but can't do the monkey dance of performing live coding, maybe they would find these types of programmers again...