Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI?
The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implications, knowing what approaches are likely to cause problems, recognizing patterns that can be refactored, knowing where likely problems lie and how to test them, holding a complex codebase in memory and knowing where to find things -- currently come from long experience writing code.
But a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from?
I think of this because of my job as a professor; many of the homework assignments we use to develop thinking skills are now obsolete because LLMs can do them, permitting the students to pass without thinking. Perhaps there is another way to develop the skills, but I don't know what it is, and in the mean time I'm not sure how novices will learn to become experts.
Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?
Basically, force students to do it by hand long enough that they understand the essentials. Introduce LLMs at a point similar to when you allow students to use a calculator.
Calculators have made most people a lot worse in arithmetic. Many people, for instance, don't even grasp what a "30%" discount is. I mean other than "it's a discount" and "it's a bigger discount than 20% and lower than 40%". I have seen examples where people don't grasp that 30% is roughly one third. It's just a discount, they trust it.
GPS navigation has made most people a lot worse at reading maps or generally knowing where they are. I have multiple examples where I would say something like "well we need to go west, it's late in the day so the sun will show us west" and people would just not believe me. Or where someone would follow their GPS on their smartphone around a building to come back 10m behind where they started, without even realising that the GPS was making them walk the long way around the building.
Not sure the calculator is a good example to say "tools don't make people worse with the core knowledge".
Arithmetic is a subset of maths.
Hell, if I had to do long division today without a computer I'd have to re-derive it.
And I don't mean specifically those numbers, obviously. Same goes with 20/100, or understanding orders of magnitudes, etc.
Many people will solve a "maths problem" with their calculator, end up with a result that says that "the frog is moving at 21km/s" and not realise that it doesn't make any sense. "Well I applied the recipe, the calculator gave me this number, I assume this number is correct".
It's not only arithmetic of course, but it's part of it. Some kind of basic intuition about maths. Just look at what people were saying during Covid. I have heard so many people say completely wrong stuff because they just don't have a clue when they see a graph. And then they vote.