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Tistel | 7 months ago

I am not worried about personal atrophy. I am worried about young people who never learn the fundamentals and blindly believe everything the llm say.

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rijoja|7 months ago

computer science is not social science

if your code doesn't work it doesn't work

you can't bullshit a computer

for people that are doing social science it's an issue

but they where way past the point of no return already so it doesn't really matter

grues-dinner|7 months ago

> if your code doesn't work it doesn't work

Code can definitely only sort of work: only works on the happy path, only works on the computer it was developed on, only works for some versions of some dependencies, only works when single threaded, only works when the network is fast enough, only works for a single user at a time etc etc etc.

haileys|7 months ago

Software engineering is way more of a social practice than you probably want to believe.

Why is the code like that? How are people likely to use an API? How does code change over time? How can we work effectively on a codebase that's too big for any single person to understand? How can we steer the direction of a codebase over a long timescale when it's constantly changing every day?

monsieurgaufre|7 months ago

I’d argue that computer science is on a gradient between social science and physics.

queenkjuul|7 months ago

Code can absolutely "kinda work" or "mostly work"

deepdarkforest|7 months ago

>if your code doesn't work it doesn't work

you can't bullshit a computer

this is wrong. I would argue the difference between a junior dev/intern and a senior engineer is that while both can write code that works, the juniors find local maximas, like solutions that work, but can't scale, or wont be very easy to integrate/add features on top/maintain etc.

This happens in maths, biology, in all science fields. Experience is partly the ability to take decisions between options that both work.

This is why coding assistants are amazing at executing things you are clear on what you want to do, but can't help (yet) on big picture tweaks