I'm so old I remember when calculators started appearing in general people's hands. Schools first banned them (what da ya mean you can't add a column of numbers by eye?) But gradually we switched over. We had a flirting interaction with log tables, and never did get to use a slide rule. I've no doubt old-school businesses were aghast at our ineptitude.
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
> College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
At least with a calculator, people still had to know the difference between addition and multiplication, in order to use the calculator correctly
> You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
Driving an LLM properly requires knowing to evaluate if the results are correct. People can certainly try to pass generated code over for PR. But even just one code feedback or debugging should uncover if the person understood what they were doing.
What if driving an LLM well is actually a desirable skill?
What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill?
What if the next generation of programmers is not focused on the creation of new code, but rather the improvement of existing code?
What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality (something we dont especially prioritize at the moment?)
I'd argue that we're asking the current generation to be massively adaptable in terms of what was expected of us 10 (or 30) years ago, as to what will be required of them 5 years from now.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that LLMs will teach them to be adaptable. I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
> What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill
I don't believe you can do this if you can't write code, but sure. Maybe
> What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality
LLMs seem more likely to increase the value of quantity and decrease the value of quality. That's playing out in front of us right now, with people "vibecoding"
> I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
And ones who can't adapt will be ground to mulch to fuel the LLM power plants no doubt
Your response just triggered a deja-vu from back when scaffolding tools were the new hot thing, now everyone and their dog was able to spin up that todo application within one CLI command.
Except the generated code was mostly boilerplate that had to be heavily adapted for any real life use case, unveiling all the ignorance that could be covered up to that point.
It's the same with vibe code. Looks fun until you throw it into reality - and then you're on your own and better know how to deal with stuff.
A calculator will always give you correct result as long as you give it correct input. This is not the case with LLM. No matter how good your prompt is, there always a chance the output is completely garbage.
did you ever consider the idea that AI is not the same as a calculator? or consider the fact that there is no reason why there couldnt be another quantum leap next year? and another one after that?
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.