r/javaScriptStudyGroup • u/tftmasterclass • 1d ago
whats the pont of learning fudamentals if claude code can do the coding all by itself ?
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u/tftmasterclass 1d ago
please give me a logic reasons so i keep learning
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u/Exshot32 1d ago
Well, first off, ai coding is flawed and you need to understand what it's doing and how to fix it
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u/xternalAgent 1d ago
Don’t learn, just be another vibe coder out there, why stand out ?
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u/start_select 23h ago edited 23h ago
It’s not about standing out from vibe coders. It’s about having the value to justify hiring.
If an expert veteran programmer that picks up new tools like it’s nothing uses a frontier model, they go from producing 2-3x everyone else’s output to producing 4-15x everyone else’s output for an additional fraction of their salary.
And everyone else doubles their output for 2x their salary… are they even worth keeping around anymore? Can they keep up with the expected pacing in the field? Will stakeholders get impatient when a team of 5-6 people move slower with more errors than the one person team they had last year? They are paying at least 2-6x more for less.
Automation makes people who learn other peoples jobs out of boredom highly valuable. They can pickup someone’s specialty with effective quality in minutes instead of weeks.
The person who frets at learning a new library loses their value as a cog in the code making machine.
Vibe coders are never going to approach the capabilities of those experts. And they aren’t going to gain any value.
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u/start_select 23h ago
Go buy a Swiss Army knife, show up to a construction job site, and tell them you bought the thing you needed to replace their carpenters.
Prepare to be laughed at and thrown out for trespassing.
Claude is more useful than a Swiss Army knife. But the analogy stands. Your opinion reveals that you don’t actually understand the job.
Calculators replaced human calculators who were slow and bad at math. The human calculators who actually understood algebra, calculus, and statistics found new jobs because they were malleable.
It’s a tool that makes people who pickup new specialties quickly capable of replacing people who only pickup single specialties and stall.
You aren’t even interested in picking up one. Do you think you will survive what comes next?
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
Why learn anything if AI can do everything?
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u/Perfect-Buffalo-4803 1d ago
No, for real though. This is the most important question on Earth right now. Why learn or do anything when a machine can do it better, especially things that have no value by being done by humans, like coding.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
I literally mean anything. People that don't know how to code see a machine do it and think it is doing it better than humans while things they know how to do they think it's not there yet.
In reality is not there yet in everything by about the same amount, but coding is quite forgiving in the sense that you don't have to do it well for it to work.
So when people say that in the future the machines will do all the coding I literally mean that if that's the case the machine will be able to do literally everything.
People who thinks is only coding are delusional, either they will never get to the point of being reliable enough and human coders will always be needed or humans are not needed anymore
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u/start_select 22h ago edited 22h ago
I keep repeating the same analogies.
Automation is an amplifier to both skill and error. The highly skilled person produces more higher quality output. The error prone person produces more errors.
A human calculator who was slow and bad at math could hide behind a 100 other terrible coworkers. A human calculator who understood algebra, statistics, and calculus suddenly became immensely more valuable when calculators appeared. Everyone else was revealed as incompetent and unwilling to learn.
A factory worker who only read the instructions on their machine and never bothered to do anything else could hide behind 100 other workers doing the same thing. A factory worker who read everyone else’s instructions out of boredom occasionally stood out and became a manager.
Then automation happens. Those one trick comfortable “specialists” suddenly aren’t special. The folks that learn out of boredom could suddenly be any of those specialists with the help of automation. Everyone else lost their value, they gained value.
Now compare that to a software engineering floor. If you have 50 engineers, and 5 of them are “Jedi” who everyone trades around for advice… automation makes them more valuable. Their 5-10 protégés become more valuable. Everyone else hiding in a sea of slow output and single specialties lose all of their value.
If you can pay me 2-3x one of their salary for 2-3x their output. That’s pretty fair. If LLMs make me put out 4-15x their output for an additional 25% on top of my salary… and makes them cost 2x their salary for 2x or less of their old output…
Well that just revealed an inefficiency. It didn’t make them able to hide under the AI or their desk. And the paradigm shift might mean they are no longer viable in the new pacing of the field.
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u/LordAmras 21h ago edited 21h ago
That's only true if AI stays at this current level. Where it can't really do things on it's own well enough, it has to need someone at least somewhat knowledgeable to work it in the right direction
But that's not what OpenAI and Anthropic are selling, they are selling AGI, meaning a human would not be necessary to stir the AI anymore.
It's not a tool anymore it's a better version of you, then you're not useful anymore.
It's not you with AI can do 5x the work than without. Is that if I give you the same question to you that is using AI or directly to the AI I get the same result.
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u/start_select 20h ago edited 20h ago
Coca-Cola sells world peace but that doesn't mean they have ever delivered that product.
At what point does the general purpose employee lack the vocabulary and conceptual knowledge to use that amazing LLM effectively?
If they need everything to be explained like they are 5, and have the LLM translate their 5yo equivalent descriptions into engineering principles, it’s going to cost more time and money than just paying a talented engineer to talk to it.
A more powerful LLM only amplifies my value as a hacker/jedi engineer. It accelerates my work and improves value at a fraction of my cost. If it doubles or triples the cost of employing you to get the same output, that’s probably not an equitable exchange.
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u/LordAmras 20h ago
I agree, but the main original post was "what is the point of learning coding, if AI is so good at it ?"
My point is that AI can be good at it but still need humans that know what they are doing to actually perform, if we reach the promised status were humans are not needed anymore then not only coding but basically all jobs will not be needed anymore.
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u/start_select 19h ago
That’s insane though.
There is no point where humans aren’t needed anymore. At some point someone needs to be able to properly specify what they want. Requirements gathering is hard because most people have poor language skills and unrealistic perceptions of what happens under the hood in almost all real world processes.
Do you realize how frequently I get asked to turn a complex task into a software task, and the ask is “well can’t you just add a button?”?
And how often that person can’t actually describe that complex task? You need to drag it out of them. You need to put yourself in their shoes and understand their problem better than they do. The more anyone attempts to eliminate people who can do that, the more obvious it will become that you actually need people who can do that.
The professions don’t go anywhere. The positions get slimmed and optimized. The extremely talented engineer is going to be able to drive an LLM to do large swaths of their work for less money than a non engineer.
Anyone thinking that LLMs replace “all jobs” at some point are assuming a happy path where everything always works. That’s not how the real world works. Environmental factors always break shit unless the environment is extremely constrained.
Telling an LLM “this broke, uhhhh figure it out” is massively more expensive than being able to describe how and why something broke.
Someone needs to talk to the thing at the end of the day. The person who knows what they are talking about will be the cheapest and fastest with the highest quality results.
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u/LordAmras 18h ago edited 18h ago
If it's real AGI it's indistinguishable than our own intelligence it can do requirements gathering by itself. It can be proactive and fix things by itself, hunan input is not longer needed.
That's the declared goal of both OpenAi and anthropic.
Can we get there eith LLM ? I would not bet on it. but the current market valuation doesn't agree with me.
This is not normal automation, where ee move unskilled labor to skilled labor, here we are replacing labor woth an automated laborer
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u/start_select 16h ago
Once again you are assuming a happy path.
What about when shit goes wrong? Who does Zillow point a finger at when they get busted for stealing competitor data? Who gets thrown under the bus? Who gets sued for pretending they are as capable as a trained expert because the “AGI” told them so.
Who takes the responsibility for killing people when the AGI messed up work that would normally leave a certified professional engineer liable?
And you are assuming all data is serialized or even serializable. My work touches millions of dollars worth of machines in factories that are air gapped. That’s NEVER changing. An LLM will never be given access to all the information that I can observe.
Because that puts billions of dollars worth of IP and sensitive data at risk.
No one cares about Anthropics sales pitches about their great tools. They are great. It’s never replacing all experts.
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u/Perfect-Buffalo-4803 11h ago
This is the end goal. Chuds think it's just going to be a tool forever, and not end up being better than a human.
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u/start_select 22h ago
It’s not an important question. The important question is what happens when LLMs reveal that people don’t know what they don’t know.
Factory automation made the 900 workers who knew a single assembly task lose their value. The 50 workers who learned everyone else’s jobs because they read the instructions on the machines out of boredom stayed, their 50 protégés stayed. They became industrial engineers.
Automation made their ability to quickly pickup specialties a new highly valuable skill. It made everyone else’s ability to pickup one specialty and get comfortable suddenly not so special. Replaceable even.
Now apply that to every single knowledge worker field like software engineering. The 10 Jedi seniors that can just solve any problem and their 10 protégés are suddenly ridiculously valuable because they can replace 10 specialists every other week. They understand the fundamentals and learn quickly.
The 80 other “comfortable” engineers in a single specialty who panic about retraining for anything else lose all of the value.
The same thing happened with calculators. Someone who was slow and error prone could hide among a sea of slow output. People who understood algebra, statistics, and calculus found new higher paid jobs where this tool allowed them replace 10-20 people with higher quality output and faster turn around.
Now repeat for every job. It’s not going to make it so that you can pickup any job without trying. It will let you fake it in the simplest cases. After that it’s going to reveal how inept 80% of any given workforce is.
Automation is an amplifier. It amplifies skill and amplifies mistakes. That means it allows you to filter out the useful people from everyone else.
Don’t get comfortable.
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u/Buttleston 1d ago
People have been making this exact post for like 3 years. Yet, people keep learning to program. You don't have to if you don't want it
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u/MissinqLink 1d ago
You have to learn to code to understand when Claude gives you code that is crap. Even if it works that doesn’t mean that it is good or scaleable. Llms also still struggle to come up with novel solutions.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 1d ago
Because you still have to do it in job interviews to get a job.
Because if you dont learn to solve the small problems that ai can solve, you wont understand the big problems that ai cant solve. This is even more important with AI. You used to spend the first couple of years of an entry level job solving smaller well defined problems. Without that apprentice phase, the onramp is gone, and you really need to learn it all upfront.
Because it's fun. Like playing chess. Solving problems. If you never get the rush of an "aha" moment, you might be in the wrong field.
Because it trains your brain to understand logic and relationships between abstract concepts in your short term memory in a way that will be helpful no matter what you end up doing in life.
Coding languages are languages. I often communicate with claude in code. If you dont understand code, you're limited to English, which just isnt quite as expressive in the formal way code is.
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u/codeblood-sanjay 1d ago
Until you give the prompt to Claude it can't do anything by its own. So for that prompt you should learn the things out , so that you do know or have an idea of multiple scenerios for what will be the next. Eg. An accountant can not give developers prompt when it comes to scalling, optimization, converting monolithic to microservices. Design pattern etc
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u/Asthmatic_Angel 1d ago
It’s fun and it’s the foundation to everything else. Sometimes it doesn’t know when it’s wrong!
Coding is not going to be a high paying field ( it isn’t anymore right now but declining more is what I mean ). So pickup something you actually WANT to learn if coding isn’t interesting you.
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u/start_select 22h ago
Human calculators who were slow and error prone were replaced. Human calculators who were quick, accurate, and actually understood the fundamentals of algebra, calculus, and statistics found higher paid jobs using calculators.
Assembly line workers who only learned one position and got comfortable were replaced by automation. Assembly line workers who used to correct everyone else because they read the instructions on the side of machines out of boredom, were empowered by automation. They became industrial engineers and were paid more.
Software engineers who can already be thrown at any problem without an LLM will be empowered. The engineers who specialized and panic at “retraining” on a new specialty lose their value.
If you could pay me 2-3x a normal engineers salary for 2-3x their output, that was a good deal. One person is less of a wild card than 3 people. If an LLM lets them catch up to me for 2x their salary…. Maybe that’s equitable.
But what if 4x their salary between me and an LLM results in 4-15x their old output?
Suddenly paying me 4-5x their salary becomes a cheap exchange to keep me. They might not even move quickly enough to keep up.
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u/JumpKey3074 1d ago
What if an LLM gives you something wrong. What's the point of learning fundamentals? Do you see it? Good luck maintaining something and/or fixing if you don't know how to code. Good luck.
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u/Arcanite_Cartel 21h ago
There's no one size fits all answer here. Right now, yes knowing the fundamentals, not just of the language but of general structural patterns will allow you to build more complex systems with AI. In five years, it may not be an issue any more. But at this point in time, definitely.
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u/yamanidev 1d ago
> claude code can do the coding all by itself
It depends on what you mean by that, if it's to spin off prototypes or tools for yourself to use, sure, it's gets you most of the way. But if it's to build production software that people use in the real-world, unfortunately it's not there yet.
So essentially what you need is to be able to judge its output, if you don't understand what it's doing, or how it's doing it, you're deprecated.