As a prof, it’s getting a little depressing. I’ll have students that really seem to be getting to grips with the material, nailing their assignments, and then when they’re brought in for in-person labs… yeah, they can barely declare a function, let alone implement a solution to a fairly novel problem. AI has been hugely useful while programming, I won’t deny that! It really does make a lot of the tedious boilerplate a lot less time-intensive to deal with. But holy crap, when the crutch is taken away people don’t even know how to crawl.
Seem to be 2 problems. One is obvious, the other is that such tedious boilerplate exists.
I mean, all engineering is divide and conquer. Doing the same thing over and over for very different projects seems to be a fault in paradigm. Like when making a GUI with tcl/tk you don’t really need that, but with qt you do.
I’m biased as an ASD+ADHD person that hasn’t become a programmer despite a lot of trying, because there are a lot of things which don’t seem necessary, but huge, turning off my brain via both overthinking and boredom.
But still - students don’t know which work of what they must do for an assignment is absolutely necessary and important for the core task and which is maybe not, but practically required. So they can’t even correctly interpret the help that an “AI” (or some anonymous helper) is giving them. And thus, ahem, prepare for labs …
If you’re in school, everything being taught to you should be considered a core task and practically required. You can then reassess once you have graduated and a few years into your career as you’ll now possess the knowledge of what you need and what you like and what you should know. Until then, you have to trust the process.
As a prof, it’s getting a little depressing. I’ll have students that really seem to be getting to grips with the material, nailing their assignments, and then when they’re brought in for in-person labs… yeah, they can barely declare a function, let alone implement a solution to a fairly novel problem. AI has been hugely useful while programming, I won’t deny that! It really does make a lot of the tedious boilerplate a lot less time-intensive to deal with. But holy crap, when the crutch is taken away people don’t even know how to crawl.
Seem to be 2 problems. One is obvious, the other is that such tedious boilerplate exists.
I mean, all engineering is divide and conquer. Doing the same thing over and over for very different projects seems to be a fault in paradigm. Like when making a GUI with tcl/tk you don’t really need that, but with qt you do.
I’m biased as an ASD+ADHD person that hasn’t become a programmer despite a lot of trying, because there are a lot of things which don’t seem necessary, but huge, turning off my brain via both overthinking and boredom.
But still - students don’t know which work of what they must do for an assignment is absolutely necessary and important for the core task and which is maybe not, but practically required. So they can’t even correctly interpret the help that an “AI” (or some anonymous helper) is giving them. And thus, ahem, prepare for labs …
If you’re in school, everything being taught to you should be considered a core task and practically required. You can then reassess once you have graduated and a few years into your career as you’ll now possess the knowledge of what you need and what you like and what you should know. Until then, you have to trust the process.
People are different. For me personally “trusting the process” doesn’t work at all. Fortunately no, you don’t have to, generally.
When AI achieves sentience, it’ll simply have to wait until the last generation of humans that know how to code die off. No need for machine wars.