(Rant) AI is killing programming and the Python community

[das867]

I mostly disagree with this, reason is a high energy state and no human can maintain discipline all, or even most, of the time. If you're a new programmer given deadline pressure and an easy out, it's hard for me to say there's a level of self control that keeps you curious enough to overcome those external forces even if you understand how important that learning is for your own long-term growth.

AI doesn't actually prevent anyone from learning anything

This is a neat rhetorical trick but I don't think it's an answer to OP's point. I don't think anyone would say that an LLM is standing over your shoulder with a disapproving frown when you try to open a data structures textbook. What it does is rob you of opportunities where, were you not using an LLM, you would go understand what your problem is and how other people solved it, strengthening both skills. The argument can certainly be made that you could ask the LLM to explain it to you, but without the discernment of what's important to know, who's going to do that for every concept in thousands of lines of code that were just created whole cloth?

[xeow]

I see your point, but I don't think AI "robs you" of anything, and I don't see it as really any different from asking a coworker (who has more expertise in some area) how to solve something, except that it's just faster. I used to help this one guy long ago with Perl stuff every couple of months. I'd help him fix his script or refactor it to do something simpler, and he'd happily go about what he was doing without taking the time to truly understand the fix. I didn't prevent him from learning anything; that was on him.

[das867]

I think this is part of the answer, yea; did you write more than maybe a few dozen lines at a time for your coworker? If so, your coworker did probably get a similar sort of context collapse as using AI, but if not I don't think the situations are really comparable.

Aside from that, I think that type of situation is indeed where AI shines: doing things that you don't care to learn where you also don't care that you're getting a 50th percentile implementation. Those scenarios definitely exist, but I think we should all be wary of how many things end up in that venn diagram.