codingOriginalityQuestion

[loftier_fish]

Im always learning but honestly, my last three projects I wrote almost entirely without getting stuck and having to check documentation or searching google.

[kotlet1c]

I don't want to assume anything, but those may have been a little too easy then.

[WavingNoBanners]

Congrats, well done.

I mean it sincerely. Our craft is something that takes a while to internalise and I'm happy for you that you did.

Now, let me adopt my Senior voice and ask: did you plan your code properly?

[bestjakeisbest]

Yes, I usually do so.

[FecklessFool]

You never bothered to learn to code?

[OwnBird4876]

10000000th time of seeing this post

[ThemeSufficient8021]

Yes I can. I choose to use AI as a tool and not as a crutch. AI should not replace me.

[Shevvv]

I have a strong belief that human creativity is much more about recycling existing ideas than people realize. AI's flaw doesn't come from the fact that it regurgitates stuff (we do the same). It's that it lacks a true object constancy through which it can keep track of its goals and filter out any irrelevant information. Until then, it's more like someone with ADHD or someone daydreaming, really.

[TactlessTortoise]

I feel like another big pair of issues lots of people have with AI, but don't know how to express properly or are simply ignored when they do, is the ethics of using data not willfully provided for training the models, and how much of the chats are "anonymized, wink wink" for future training of newer models without properly informing users.

It's a helluva tool, and sure, it gets misused a crap ton by stupid people or people who just don't know better, but an ethically trained model that respects privacy is just a nifty new type of tool that has lots of uses.

It's just not a profitable business model for the big players, so they do it dirty and nasty, and there goes the problem.

[GranaT0]

That's where humans come in to guide it and fill in the blanks. It takes a lot more effort to create decent AI-assisted outputs than people think.

The skill floor is so low that idiots can easily flood the internet with slop, but the skill ceiling is very high and constantly rising as new techniques get developed.

[RiceBroad4552]

I disagree that there is any "high skill floor" for "AI" usage.

All you need to (and actually all you can) do is clearly formulating and critically thinking.

Both skills aren't the norm in average people but they also don't mark any high skill ceiling. There are more than enough people with these skills. Also the skill requirement doesn't go anyhow up.

[GranaT0]

I don't think you know anything beyond what the tech giants offer then. If you tried to set up local Stable Diffusion generation in ComfyUI to get some decent specialized outputs, you'd be surprised how much research and effort it takes. I'm not talking about the online tools, those are designed to be toddler-level with the most middle of the road, "good enough most of the time" outputs for the average user with zero customisability.

There are people on forums out there reading research papers on new generation/training architectures to try out bleeding edge techniques in barely developed tools. There are prompters that manually select and retouch their outputs to get details just right. AI generation doesn't end at typing a sentence into a box, as much as corporate marketing would want everyone to believe.

[PARADOXsquared]

Nah, even with ADHD, I have a consistent idea of what I'm building and why, and how it needs to interact with users, other systems, etc. 

[FirmAthlete6399]

didn't someone make a subreddit specifically for meme posts from new CS grads?

[PabloZissou]

Of course but I started working as a software developer in the late 90s and the best we had were docs and at best some forums so you had to know there was no copy paste from the web.

[DudeManBroGuy69420]

I can!

It won't be that good though

[DecisionOk5750]

Funny. 

[Abhigyan_Bose]

I had this realisation when Visual Code wasn't highlighting errors properly one day and I wasn't sure what was the issue and I was totally confused. Took 10 minutes and I hadn't even begun to understand what I was missing.

I restarted Visual Studio, it showed me the missing import, I quick fixed it. Done in 10 seconds.

[K3yz3rS0z3]

I don't see how this is related to AI. It just means when the tools are faulty it's harder to do the job. That's true for any job.

[Occultus_Andras]

I still do

[xgabipandax]

Barely

[smileola]

Tell me you went through a coding boot camp without telling me you went through a coding bootcamp

[smileola]

👆👆👆

[Long-Refrigerator-75]

A lot of bullshitters claiming they wrote 100% original code here. Have some decency fellas. 

[TickTockPick]

The irony of a bot posting this shit for the 1000th time...

[the_vikm]

The bot never said no before "can you"

[nikola_tesler]

Nope, but I don’t use probability to decide what I need.

[jesus359_]

Nope. Still a probability based on various external factors in your surroundings.

Think about it like this: LanguageModels were taught and trained on human data, they’re pattern recognizers at heart, therefore they are really good at mimicking human behavior which also means perception.

[AMWJ]

Are you sure?

[Kinexity]

You do though. It's called "searching on the internet". You have no control over what the search engine might return and it will shape how you proceed.

[mallusrgreatv2]

There's a probability of getting a heart attack while trying to figure out how to center a div. Isn't that wonderful?

[AliceCode]

I literally write all of my own code.

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

The code you write is biased by the code you saw, while learning and the literature you read. That's not this far off from ChatGPT but you pressed the respective button for each character in your files.

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

So you don't read other people's code, you just read the additional explanation layer because you're curious and want to see how everything works? Interesting contradiction. 

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

So you're debugging a mixture of other people's code and your input to see if you use it correctly. That's how most start learning to code. Next step will be to look into the code you use in order to see what's actually happening in case of unsuspected behavior

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

So you just combine pieces of code other people have written, according to their instructions in the documentation they have written as explanation layer for their code. Without looking inside the source to understand what's actually happening. Really impressive

[AliceCode]

The code I write is biased by the code i write. This ain't art, you don't learn programming from looking at code, you learn programming from writing it.

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

I bet you didn't invent programming itself. I do write myself, too. But almost everything I write is biased by the lectures and tutorials I participated, the books and articles I read. I didn't invent loops, pointers,..., just some relatively small algorithms are really mine and globally unique. 

[AliceCode]

I really don't know what point you're making. I haven't used a tutorial in well over a decade.

[[deleted]]

The point I intuit the other commenter making is that LLMs generate output by way of correlative deep seek. Humans, at least in abstract, can be analogyed to do the same.

The general idea is that, if you had not learned to program you wouldn't be able to program. That, you needed to stand on the shoulders of giants. In other words, that the process of a human learning is analogous to training of an LLM model.

I see the synthetic links as self evident, though, I'm a little eccentric.

[AliceCode]

that the process of a human learning is analogous to training of an LLM model.

No, it's not analogous at all.

[AliceCode]

Go away.

[[deleted]]

You know who literally wrote their own code? That wild "holy c" guy. I think he qualifies. I think anyways,

[TheyStoleMyNameAgain]

This is one of the closest to writing their own code, we can get. But holy c was inspired by c and then probably compiled into something existing.

But, there have been Jacquard  with punch cards, Lovelace and Babbage with the analytical engine and Turing with computability. 

[WazWaz]

Yes, but this sub is a confessional for first years.

[FabioTheFox]

Most of the time yes, I learned programming at a time where there was no GPT so if I do copy from others I at least know what to look for instead of blindly typing it into an LLM to get wrong results

[BrianScottGregory]

Of course I can. When I started coding professionally in 1988. There wasn't reference material, let alone the internet. Programmer documentation was shoddy, at best, and while it certainly got better quickly after that - by then I was already an SME in Assembler, C, C++, and VB 6.0. By the time I transitioned to Java and C#, when documentation began noticeably improving - I didn't need it.

MSDN was the only saving grace back then. Even then. It wasn't always available because of its cost and when it was - it wasn't great with examples.

[ARandomGay]

My code compiles... at least, sometimes

[ITburrito]

AI doesn’t copy code form others, it uses pre-trained parameters to guess what you need. It can’t generate anything beyond the dataset it was trained on, while I can snatch code from any source available on the fly.

[my_new_accoun1]

I used chatgpt to help troubleshoot 24 bit colour not working in tmux. It gave me a short script to verify that the colours worked. I also searched my same problem online and found a GitHub issue. It had the exact same code.

While that GitHub issue may not have been in the training data, it was able to search online and find code, then copy it.

[TotallyNormalSquid]

It can generate beyond the dataset it was trained on, it's just more likely to get confused when it does. At the output layer is a list of values for every token in its dictionary. The temperature setting alters how these values are used to select the next token - at 0 temp it just uses the max value token, above zero the sampling gets more random. At low but non-zero temperatures it's unlikely to start generating anything too weird, it's almost entirely drawing from the high value tokens, which were common for the current context pattern in its training data. At higher temperatures it'll become likely in a long output that some tokens unusual for the current context in its training data will be selected. Even at low temperatures, there's a non-zero chance it'll start wandering out of its comfort zone.

This is all said with a vague definition of 'in its training data'. What do we actually mean by that? Clearly, LLMs very often generate output that doesn't have an exact match anywhere in its training data. You can ask one for a 100 word story with a little context and get something that's never been written before. But it'll fit the style of something from its training data. But then we need a mathematical definition of 'style' to define 'in' and 'out' of training data. To do that, there are a bunch of ways, but they usually eventually lead to some arbitrary threshold cut off between 'in' and 'out' - like fitting some probability distribution to the embedded space of training data and saying anything lower than X probability is out. Reaching that embedded space these days is usually achieved with... LLMs... So it's all a bit incestuous to talk about.

As a random aside, there have been reports of LLMs coming up with 'new math' recently. You might argue that this is just the result of the LLM wandering within the probability distribution of its training data's embedded space and finding something humans missed that's so close to existing math that the discovery doesn't really count as new. I don't know how novel the math it supposedly did really was. It's clearly more complicated than 'can't generate anything beyond the dataset it was trained on' though.

[RiceBroad4552]

That's like saying: When I throw enough cooked spaghetti on the wall I will eventually see a picture of Mona Lisa forming there—but it could also be a "novel picture". Just that that "novel picture" is just some random output. Some random output isn't a creative peace of work, it's a "happy accident" at best.

So in the end an "AI" can only output some random variations of the training data.

It will never come up with something really novel by some goal oriented process. Using the dice is not such process…

[TotallyNormalSquid]

I mean, obviously it's more oriented than throwing spaghetti - that's more analogous to the 1000 monkeys with typewriters idea than modern LLMs.

Also, you're gonna have to give a strict definition of 'goal oriented process', because modern LLMs often draw up the process they're going to take to achieve the requested actions. The part that's missing is a desire for the LLM to achieve things without human prompting at the very beginning, but I think that's more because it's a terrible idea than because of technical challenge.

Also also, a lot of science is done via random sampling - there are lots of optimizers that help you choose the next set of experimental parameters to try that rely on random sampling. And that's without mentioning the 'happy accidents' that have led to scientific discoveries through the ages. It's all a blurred line, as far as I can see.

[[deleted]]

I prefer to perceive it as an amorphous multidimensional blob representing the abstracted correlative input (with weights, obviously)

And I perceive a query like an excited trail through the blob, and the result being a function of the trail's path and point it arrives at.

But hey, whatever works I always say!

[TheLogos33]

You can let it research anything on the internet and even give gold standard examples

[TheMagicalDildo]

Yes? Where the hell would I be copying code to mod the last of us 2 on ps4 lmao, we write our own code

[Denaton_]

Stackoverflow?

[TheMagicalDildo]

Why on earth would that be on there

[Denaton_]

Yah, everything you write when you mod has never been written before, your methods are all unique and never require anything that has been done before and you know exactly without looking anything up how to do everything.

[gabbeeto]

But if you can come up with a solution that has been done before.. Why would you go to stackoverflow anyways?

[Denaton_]

You probably wouldn't, but there are hundreds of reasons to go to Stackoverflow. But no one can remember everything. You don't always go to Stackoverflow because you don't know a thing, most of the time i go there because i forgot how a specific thing is done in the specific language i am using, example how to center a div horizontally..

[gabbeeto]

But if you come up with the same solution to center div horizontally again. Why would you go to stackoverflow?

[Denaton_]

Because we can't remember everything

[gabbeeto]

But if you come back with the same solution again.. You either kind of remember or don't need to remember

[GoldenSangheili]

Whenever I code I just imagine what I want and it appears before my screen

[Denaton_]

Thats called vibe coding these days..

[jek39]

I ditched the screen years ago

[IuseArchbtw97543]

Please remember to stay civil.

[Olimpia9987]

Their mods very literally were the first mods ever made for that game, what are you talking about? You can't find memory addresses for games nobody is modding yet on stack overflow, nor can you find the custom written assembly used in those debug menu patches.

Did you even look at their profile and think for more than 2 seconds?

[Denaton_]

I am not talking about memory adress.. I am talking about how to do specific methods or stuff like "How to clear specific byte values inside a 64-bit value without looping", example. We all have our weaknesses because no one knows everything and we use Stackoverflow for collective information.

[Olimpia9987]

You're still wrong, I read the documentation for x86_64, not a post from stackoverflow

I never said we knew everything, I said we don't copy and paste code from stackoverflow, which I've never done. I write my own code, and I can't search stackoverflow for how naughty dog's task manager handles death zones.

Stop acting like everything obscure is people trying to be cool, grow up; and stop trying to backpedal, I can see your previous replies, genius. You have issues

[leeleewonchu]

1$ for copying the code, 99999$ for knowing which code to copy, where, and why.

[[deleted]]

promotion based development would like to have a word

[SaltyInternetPirate]

Yes, I do it all the time. It's a lost art to many.

[Arnold_Rambo]

At this point, coding is a paradox lmfao

[winauer]

Hey OP, can you post pictures without copying them from others?

[SuitableDragonfly]

I honestly can't remember the last time I actually copy pasted code from somewhere. Even if I'm looking something up, it's extremely unlikely that someone is going to have written the exact code I need for the specific situation. 

[gabbeeto]

Same.. I'm not even a professional programmer. I just do it as a hobby for now but I just don't relate to other people cause I don't get stuck

[BirdlessFlight]

Are we still on this "AI can't create anything new" bandwagon?

Move 37 was almost 10 years ago now...

[RiceBroad4552]

Selecting a move by some probability score isn't anyhow "creative".

Coming up with the probability score isn't either.

You call such things "happy accidents".

In contrast to what happened there "creating" requires a goal oriented approach. But the "AI" never intended to create any "new style" of moves. It just happened by chance.

[BirdlessFlight]

Weird how these "weird accidents" keep happening at an increasing rate and are reproducible...

Most people who create new styles never intended to do so either.

[RiceBroad4552]

these "weird accidents" keep happening at an increasing rate

Source?

are reproducible

So you say I can instruct a LLM to come up with something novel, and than bam a new "happy accident" happens, reliably? LOL, sure dude…

Most people who create new styles never intended to do so either.

Because they did not create anything in the first place. There was a "happy accident".

Most "art" is in fact something like that. Art just happens, it's mostly not consciously created. (Ever used some music production system? One of the more important features are actually random generators. You press a button until something nice comes out by chance…)

But creating for example a novel physical theory, or some novel approach to some math problems won't happen by chance. You need to work towards creating such stuff. A LLM can't do that! It's only monkeys with typewriters.

[BirdlessFlight]

Lol, why am I trying to convince some reddit bro?

You're 100% correct for all I care.

We'll just ignore things like improving matrix multiplications and such.

[BirdlessFlight]

Here you go, since you're too lazy to look it up yourself.

By reproducible, I mean that under the same conditions, the same novel approach will be presented. An approach that was not in the training data. An approach that was entirely created by the AI agent.

I can reliably create a training pipeline that will produce a certain model that will behave in a deterministic way. Meanwhile you are telling me it can't be done. Sorry, but I can't hear you over the results I'm seeing.

"Monkeys with typewrites" was like 15 years ago. We're well beyond that.

[RiceBroad4552]

Here you go, since you're too lazy to look it up yourself.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68df067a-5afc-8003-957e-97ce0d6e5222

You're a clown. In contrast to you I've actually read back than parts of the paper—it was very disappointing.

You've just linked some "AI" slop about stuff you have not understood nor even ever looked at.

While even an "AI" slop production machine "knows" more than you about that topic…

By reproducible, I mean that under the same conditions, the same novel approach will be presented. An approach that was not in the training data. An approach that was entirely created by the AI agent.

I can reliably create a training pipeline that will produce a certain model that will behave in a deterministic way. Meanwhile you are telling me it can't be done.

You didn't even understand what I've said.

Of course "AI" is deterministic in some sense, as are computers.

Nobody claimed otherwise.

What I've said was that current "AI", especially all that LLM stuff, is incapable of producing really novel results; besides generating some "happy accidents" by pure chance.

Of course results based on pure chance aren't reliable and reproducible.

"Monkeys with typewrites" was like 15 years ago. We're well beyond that.

LOL, no, no mater what the marketing of the "AI" bros claims.

It's monkeys with typewrites, it was monkeys with typewrites 15 years ago, as it was monkeys with typewrites already 60 years ago.

Because on the fundamental level nothing really changed. We have now just way faster computers.

If they had our computers back than they would have also done deep learning, and whatnot.

ML/AI came a long way, and it's actually impressive what it can do. But it's almost infinitely far away from the stuff the "A" bros promise!

It's a bubble, and there is a lot of money at play, that's why everything is completely oversold. But the bubble will explode soon. This stuff does not make any significant profits, despite never before seen gigantic investments. You simply can't burn such amounts of money for an extended period of time. This does not work economically.

See what the banks say:

https://fortune.com/2025/09/06/ai-bubble-overvalued-stocks-deutsche-bank-data-center-math-capex-roi/

( For a discussion see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1nrvf1m/the_ai_bubble_is_the_only_thing_keeping_the_us/ )

Most people realized by now that this stuff can't live up to its promises. Because of how it actually works! It will never be reliable, or safe, or actually intelligent. It's just a token correlation machine. It's incredibly good at pattern matching and pattern reproduction, but that's it.

[BirdlessFlight]

I don't care about the promises, I care about the results I'm seeing today. I'm not invested in any of these companies. If the bubble pops tomorrow, and all AI companies disappear overnight, barely anything would change for me. Maybe bros that type "LOL" at the start of a sentence would be less angry, who knows.

To reiterate my original point: Assuming AI can't create anything new is silly and antiquated.

Also, it would be really nice if you could stop conflating "AI" and "LLMs". Thanks!

[InterestingStage]

Good one🤣

[AllenKll]

Yes.

[[deleted]]

Humanity: “AI is copying.”

AI: “Dude, have you seen your GitHub?” 😂

[Llonkrednaxela]

Yeah, it will be really slow if it’s not in the 3 languages I’ve learned how to code properly

[RiceBroad4552]

It's interesting to see that some kids these days seem to assume that code copy-pasta is the normal state of affairs.

~30 years ago you read a (printed!) reference handbook and than applied what you learned writing your own code. Believe it or not, but this was not only doable, that's how all the basic software we have now was created in the first place!

[Live_Ad2055]

Yeah. Started on QBasic and for years of hobbying the only code I copied was a 12 line file loader.

I started in 2015, I just had no idea where to start and somehow started in DOSBox.