alt Hacker NewsI think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.
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>AI is an incredible teaching tool.
As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information.
In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.
Research [0] from Anthropic about juniors learning to code with AI/without:
>the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group
And why would they do better? There's less incentive to learn because it's so easy to offload thinking to AI.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
Objectively speaking, students that use AI score more than a full grade point below their peers not using AI.
AI makes students dumber, not smarter.
This is the dumbest thought that proliferates this website.
Super great that it’s used to pump out tons of code because upper management wants features released even faster than before. I’m sure the junior devs who don’t know a for loop from their ass will be able to learn and understand wtf Claude is shitting out
> AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code.
It is but how do you teach to people who think their new profession is being a "senior prompt engineer" (with 4 months of experience) and who believe that in 12 months there won't be any programmer left?
A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher.
You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?
Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming up again and again but people in general doesn’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors, they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes this difference a lot worse.
I do agree it’s a great tool, so much better than trying to hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with “I don’t understand this line of code.”
However, it’s got a lot of downsides too.
Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR.
“It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.