zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the line of code where it comes from, because I wrote it or something next to it (or can immediately ask someone who probably did). You don't get that with AI. The codebase is always new. Everything must be investigated carefully. When stuff slips through code review, even if it is a mistake you might have made, you would remember that you made it. When humans do not do the work, humans do not accrue the experience. (This may still be a good tradeoff, I haven't run any numbers. But it's not such an obvious tradeoff as TFA implies.)

>>pie_fl+33
So do the thing that a student copying their notes from the board does: look at the PR on one monitor, and write your own equivalent PR by typing the changes line-for-line into your IDE on the other. Pretend copy/paste doesn’t exist. Pretend it’s code you saw in a YouTube video of a PowerPoint presentation, or a BASIC listing from one of those 1980s computing magazines.

(And, if you like, do as TFA says and rephrase the code into your own house style as you’re transcribing it. It’ll be better for it, and you’ll be mentally parsing the code you’re copying at a deeper level.)

>>derefr+k4
You still didn't have to build the mental model, understand the subtle tradeoffs and make the decisions that arrived at that design.

I'm amazed that people don't see this. Absolutely nobody would claim that copying a novel is the same thing as writing a novel.

>>roarch+b6
I feel like the dismissal of mental models is a direct consequence on the tech industry's manaical focus on scale and efficiency as the end-all be-all values to optimize.

Nevermind other important values like resilience, adaptability, reliability, and scrutability. An AI writes a function foo() that does a thing correctly; who has the know-how that can figure out if foo() kills batteries, or under what conditions it could contribute to an ARP storm or disk thrashing, or what implicit hardware requirements it has?