This short video from a major player in the coding sphere (JetBrains) has a remarkably good take on when and where AI in coding has its uses especially in the early stages of learning to code. Of...
This short video from a major player in the coding sphere (JetBrains) has a remarkably good take on when and where AI in coding has its uses especially in the early stages of learning to code. Of course they're pushing their own Academy and products, however that doesn't dilute the importance of their take.
To put words in their mouth, it's best if you actually learn to code and use your tools, and only ever ask the AI to do something you know how to do yourself, especially when starting out. Later, when you're more confident and better at coding, you could integrate AI more intelligently into your tool chest.
Personally I kind of skipped the whole doing things the non-LLM way throughout my process, really makes me constantly feel like something is missing but at the same time everyone is encouraging...
Personally I kind of skipped the whole doing things the non-LLM way throughout my process, really makes me constantly feel like something is missing but at the same time everyone is encouraging it. It does not help that for a novice coder the amount of borderline wrong information is actively hostile; I block geeks4geeks and freecodecamp from my search results.
Even something supposedly "beginner friendly" like python has docs that are really hard to navigate and extract something useful. (rust does this better, imo, followed by java). I do get that people cut their teeth on forums like stack overflow but really some few individuals just turn off newcomers (telling people to RTFM is fully justified but honestly it's a separate problem in async communication where one can spam)
At the same time, even my undegraduate computer science curriculum didn't guide me through making design judgement (like in the video, explaining why you use a binary tree over a linked list). I went through a whole independent research on whether there exists such a teaching on designing programs, and after a year I yield that it can only be done through trial and feedback from someone more senior. Kind of a depressing sink-or-swim thing imo, either you come out the other end and "get it" or you don't.
Python started out fairly simple, but it's a pretty complicated language nowadays. Asking an LLM questions seems like a good source of hints as long as you don't trust the answers and verify them...
Python started out fairly simple, but it's a pretty complicated language nowadays.
Asking an LLM questions seems like a good source of hints as long as you don't trust the answers and verify them another way.
This short video from a major player in the coding sphere (JetBrains) has a remarkably good take on when and where AI in coding has its uses especially in the early stages of learning to code. Of course they're pushing their own Academy and products, however that doesn't dilute the importance of their take.
To put words in their mouth, it's best if you actually learn to code and use your tools, and only ever ask the AI to do something you know how to do yourself, especially when starting out. Later, when you're more confident and better at coding, you could integrate AI more intelligently into your tool chest.
Now if we could just convince management...
Personally I kind of skipped the whole doing things the non-LLM way throughout my process, really makes me constantly feel like something is missing but at the same time everyone is encouraging it. It does not help that for a novice coder the amount of borderline wrong information is actively hostile; I block geeks4geeks and freecodecamp from my search results.
Even something supposedly "beginner friendly" like python has docs that are really hard to navigate and extract something useful. (rust does this better, imo, followed by java). I do get that people cut their teeth on forums like stack overflow but really some few individuals just turn off newcomers (telling people to RTFM is fully justified but honestly it's a separate problem in async communication where one can spam)
At the same time, even my undegraduate computer science curriculum didn't guide me through making design judgement (like in the video, explaining why you use a binary tree over a linked list). I went through a whole independent research on whether there exists such a teaching on designing programs, and after a year I yield that it can only be done through trial and feedback from someone more senior. Kind of a depressing sink-or-swim thing imo, either you come out the other end and "get it" or you don't.
Python started out fairly simple, but it's a pretty complicated language nowadays.
Asking an LLM questions seems like a good source of hints as long as you don't trust the answers and verify them another way.