As large language models take over more and more cognitive tasks, researchers are warning this mental outsourcing comes with a cost.

In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?

  • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
    0·
    5 days ago

    So…you are concerned that you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?

    Did you know how to do that math before hand?

    I think the biggest risk to using AI is that people don’t first learn how to do something before using tools to do the thing. In other words, our 7th grade teachers were right. You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

    • iglou@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

      I don’t really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.

      But it doesn’t generalise to everything. I don’t need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.

      And this might be an unpopular take, but you don’t even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.