Is it too late to learn to code \ stacker news ~tech

2284 sats \ 36 comments \ @POTUS 18 Oct 2023 tech

Is it too late to learn to code? I’ve been learning for the last few weeks but I keep seeing these posts about AI coding something up that would normally take hours in seconds. So is this a skill that will become irrelevant?

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1757 sats \ 12 replies \ @Bullen 18 Oct 2023

131 sats \ 0 replies \ @shurikencutter 18 Oct 2023

I asked chatgpt what it thinks about this picture:

Explanation: The comic humorously points out the perception versus reality of AI's role in reducing complexity. Here's a breakdown:

Current Situation: Engineers face a "pile of complexity" in the form of languages, toolchains, and infrastructure.
What People Think AI Will Do: Non-engineers believe that AI will make this pile of complexity disappear, simplifying the process and leading directly to applications.
What Is Actually Going to Happen: Instead of entirely eliminating the complexity, AI introduces its own set of complexities. This means engineers will still face challenges, albeit different ones, and perhaps even more than before.

The comic suggests that while AI might hide or change some of the complexities, it doesn't eliminate them entirely. Engineers will still have to grapple with new challenges introduced by AI, in addition to the pre-existing ones. This is a sentiment shared by many in the tech industry, as any new technology brings its own set of intricacies and challenges.

Opinion: The comic reflects a sentiment that, while advancements like AI promise simplification, they often introduce new complexities. This is not just true for AI but for many technological advancements. The introduction of new technologies usually brings a learning curve and the need to manage and integrate these technologies within existing systems.

From a technical standpoint, the comic touches on a real challenge: AI, while powerful, is not a panacea. Implementing AI can introduce new layers of complexity in terms of data management, model training, interpretability, and more.

So, the comic offers a humorous yet critical perspective on the promise versus the practical implications of AI in the realm of software development and engineering.

110 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Oct 2023

That's such a great distillation of what I've been trying to tell people about AI. I'm usually thinking about it from a scientific research standpoint, rather than an engineering one, but it's the same point.

120 sats \ 8 replies \ @ek 18 Oct 2023

Yes, people who actually know how stuff works will maybe be even more in demand ... since it will be hard to find them between all these "I can code but actually I just use AI so I have no idea what I am doing" types of people ?

138 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Oct 2023

All AI can do is anticipate what you were trying to do. If you're thoughts are too unstructured and vague to do the programming, you will likely not be able to tell if the AI even did what you wanted.

Where I do see room for AI is alleviating a lot of repetitive coding with advanced auto-complete functions and being able to quickly look through the code for possible mistakes.

181 sats \ 6 replies \ @ek 18 Oct 2023

yes, AI is like a buddy that knows some stuff very well but you don't fully trust him since he's drunk very often and then goes on rampages about stuff that is completely irrelevant to the discussion ...

21 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Oct 2023

Good analogy

271 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 18 Oct 2023

another funny analogy I just had during a private discussion with @shurikencutter was that AI is not going to wipe your ass

but then i turned around and said, wait, maybe it will. but the point is, how do you know that it wiped your ass correctly if you don't even know how to wipe your ass? lol

121 sats \ 1 reply \ @Natalia 18 Oct 2023

how do you know that it wiped your ass correctly if you don't even know how to wipe your ass?

The funniest thing I had read today 😂

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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 18 Oct 2023

Mirrors?

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @nikotsla 19 Oct 2023

A picture is worth a thousand words

263 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 18 Oct 2023

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212 sats \ 4 replies \ @0245bdaef2 18 Oct 2023

Programming will be less important than knowing how to structure your thoughts. Just like Bitcoin, it changes you the more you understand it.

Keep going but don't expect it to be the career cash cow you might’ve expected it to be. We are likely arriving at the commodification of code.

11 sats \ 3 replies \ @0330830bf9 18 Oct 2023

This.

Being able to write psuedo code is 9/10ths of writing actual code, and that is just expressing thought. Where AI comes in is turning psuedo code into actual code, and to some extent debugging.

Coding, or at least the understanding of code structure, is becoming more like basic literacy than something you monetize directly.

As a new coder, you can thank AI for never having to master RegEx.

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @nemo 18 Oct 2023

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129 sats \ 1 reply \ @0245bdaef2 18 Oct 2023

RegEx aka the dark arts

Show me a person who can write RegEx from scratch without help and I’ll show you a person who has been severely hurt

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 18 Oct 2023

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161 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Oct 2023

Some of the particulars of coding will be made obsolete by new technologies, but that's been happening the whole time as higher level programming languages were developed.

It will always be important that people understand the mechanisms of what is going on under the hood.

161 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsCats 18 Oct 2023

I've also just started to learn. I don't intend to code myself, but I want to gain the knowledge as I feel it will help me better understand and communicate more efficiently with developers.

160 sats \ 0 replies \ @nel0 19 Oct 2023

Knowing how to code is a great skill, not just for practical purposes, but it's also just really cool. Even if AI replaces us and starts doing all code for us, we can still do it, if nothing else, just for fun.

Answering a question more related to the market value of knowing how to code, I'd say it's still an amazing time. I don't think we'll have any AI replacing programmers any time soon. We might, within 10 years or something (the sort of timeline where it's really anyone's guess and impossible to predict) but definitely not right now or in any forseable future. AI right now is a great tool that will just help you be a better coder than without it.

Think about it as a co-pilot (which is exactly what the really useful one from github is called). It is your side kick. It help you be more productive and it does things for you. But the one thing it can't do and won't be able to for a long time is to know what to do. It might now how, but not what. Programmers will be the ones guiding the AIs for a long time in this field.

Also, bare in mind that chatgpt generated code, which seems to fit into your description is only really useful in very specific small scenarios. It's great for initial prototyping and to give you a quick snippet of code that can (if all goes well) solve a problem that fits within it's prompt and answer constraints. On any real world code base, with several files and thousands of lines of code it's just pretty much useless. However, github co-pilot is not. It's amazing, but as I said, it help you do what you already want to do, it has no wants of its own, and it's not layman friendly, you still need to know how to program to make any real use of it, and it will continue to be so for a long time.

I'll give you 2 real world examples:

I wanted to build a new API for a somewhat hobby project. I've done it quite a few times from scratch but there's always a bunch of setting up and syntax and whatnot that you just don't remember exactly. Historically I'd have to go on google, find some examples and adap to what I wanted, or also go through a bunch of documentation and tutorials, and be doing a new google search with a different question every minute. With ChatGPT I described the various database models I needed, I asked for a bunch of other components to be generated. It did it all in a few minutes. It would've taken me multiple hours to build the same thing. Now, once it was generated it was all me, and chat gpt is useless from then on. It saved me a bunch of time creating a template but it was really only the first hundred lines or so. The remaining multiple thousand since, I had to know what I was doing.
On my main job we use github copilot, and damn. The more you learn how to guide it the better it gets. Multiple times I just start writting something and it immediately suggests the following 10 lines of code, which seemingly by magic are exactly what I wanted to do. But... even better, because it's solving for edge cases I didn't think about!

Once again. They're tools. You're the pilot. They help you be more productive. They can't replace you since they have no idea what needs to be done.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @hynek 18 Oct 2023

Is it too late to learn read and write?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @scottathan 18 Oct 2023

Never too late

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 18 Oct 2023

Learning to code will give you insight into the right questions to ask chatGPT, and it will also help you spot bugs in the output

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitman 18 Oct 2023

Not feeling very confident towards the upcoming Presidential election Joe?

(Sorry, couldn't resist it in light of your nym.)

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 18 Oct 2023

If you only ever want to be average at programming, it might be too late.

If you want to put in the effort to become exceptional, AI won’t catch up for awhile I’d guess.

I’ve found AI useful on very specific and narrow prompts where I’m merely average (or below) at what I’m asking it to do. But if I ask it to do something I’m more or less leet in, it can’t hang. It also can’t yet ingest all the context of a project.

In general, I recommend pursuing things in life assuming the pursuit may be the only payoff. If you don’t want to learn to code for its own sake, don’t do it, AI or not.

152 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 18 Oct 2023

I wanted to come back and prevent this being read as "follow your passion."

When thinking about careers, the goal is to find where your passion produces things that are valuable to other people. You want to avoid maximizing passion exclusively. IMO you want to maximize both passion and value created simultaneously. It makes the problem harder but it's still tractable.

If it helps, another way to think about this is finding something

people want
that's hard for people to get
that you can imagine you can, eventually, provide relatively easily
that you get deep enjoyment providing

120 sats \ 1 reply \ @nemo 18 Oct 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 18 Oct 2023

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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @NoStranger 19 Oct 2023

What an AI do is making up something to respond to you, it doesn't care for performance, security or correctness of the logic behind it, sometimes it even imagine libraries that don't exists.

You can surely learn to code, once you get your hands on it you'll understand it's not magical.

What you can do with an AI that can be actually helpful is learn to "think" like a programmer, you can ask how to break down a problem and you can let it review "real code" to get a description of how it was made and also check if what you've done is correct or not.

But never let it write your code, if you look around you'll see that it won't go farther than simple snippets most of the time.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @raymond50romero 19 Oct 2023

Much like getting into bitcoin, it's never to late to learn how to code. I started coding when I was 22 in community college. Now I am 29 with a degree in computer science working at a startup

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @NigerianBitcoiner 19 Oct 2023

Its not too late to learn how to drive even if self driving cars keep improving everyday. You need to be able to take the wheel at any time when automation fails :)

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @random_ 18 Oct 2023

Anyone can code

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @NoCodeBitcoin 18 Oct 2023

My suggesting would be to learn no-code. As I recently posted, I created QuestionsForGood.com without writing a single line of code (I don't know how to) and yet it is a nice site with Bitcoin LN enabled.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elmartus 18 Oct 2023

Learn coding if and only if you enjoy coding. Simple as. If you love it, it's never too late.