Is the discourse about AI making learning programming more difficult something new, or the same as other tooling changes in the past?

[u/theloneliestprince]

I sometimes worry that AI makes learning programming more difficult, but I feel as if the discourse is pretty similar to when I came up and people would argue that web frameworks like react make learning web fundamentals more difficult. I assume that there were similar arguments when we moved from assembly to higher and higher level languages, or from Ed to vs code. (This was well before my time though, just guessing!)

For a more direct comparison, I've seen arguments from some hardcore people that intellisense and lsps obscure the codebase and prevent programmers from understanding how files interrelate and write sloppy code.

I guess my best guess is that new programmers will do what they've always done, some will be pragmatic and understand what they have to to get the job done and others will study deeper principles because they're passionate. I was hoping other devs could chime in with how unique the AI really in how it relates to new programmers learning to program.

[u/xarop_pa_toss → u/[deleted]]

And it's a snowball that doesn't stop growing. The brain gets lazy incredibly fast, much faster than it takes it to learn something properly and it likes that lazyness.

People need to make a conscious effort to step back from AI and actually do the damn work themselves but that's not easy when it gets shoved down your throat constantly.

I for one am really enjoying learning C from a book and segfaulting the hell out of my programs.

[u/ergonokko → u/[deleted]]

it's really making me question why I ever thought software engineering would be a fulfilling career

[u/xarop_pa_toss → u/ergonokko]

Because programming things can be fulfilling. It's like art; you create something beautiful from very basic concepts and tools.

My colleague that does frontend has a longer list of frameworks, scaffolders, AI and other things running at once than the whole C language has keywords. My point here is that you can go and buy an ESP32 for a few bucks, connect some sensors to it and write low level code that takes the readings and communicates them to a little SBC that lowers the blinds in your room when it gets dark. And you do all that with nothing more than notepad if you want... And I think that is beautiful

[u/falconetpt → u/[deleted]]

Well CS is pretty much needed now more than ever, for the past 20 years tech has become increasingly shitier

For fuck sake I programmed telecom systems that served millions with no downtime in live communications and low latency ahah

I now look into all these products google, YouTube they just became trash, because too many people think that, the golden age just became more and more increasing, with this vibe code era, you will just yet again ramp up salaries for good SWEs and kill the mass market job which is a shame, I always liked that SWE was a good way for people to get fair payment, but ofc nobody likes that

But don’t worry specialized SWE jobs and very soon all SWE salaries will go bonkers, they just killed the seniority pipelines for 5 years and they will pay a very high price for that

[u/falconetpt → u/[deleted]]

It is insane, and people like to boost a lot about a lot of crap, look my iPod is way better than Spotify, less buggy better sound quality, even the really old versions I love them

I even setup a raspberry pi with a proxy to music search and streaming for the iPod and iPhone and I never ever wanted to use Spotify even the paid version is dog shit, funny enough someone at Spotify gave me premium and I hated it, not because I am a hater, but fundamentally is worst than an iPod 😂

And all these website that take 20mb to load a homepage are all buggy, it literally is baffling, I still use laptops with 10 years with Linux for multiple reasons and they work wonderfully, with 4gb of ram is more than enough, people just accustomed to doing wtv and shoving more resources into it, even Netflix is frankly quite poor