I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to remember, but I first learned to program before I had the internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton, because I would have to read a lot of books to even know where to look; I had to do my own ‘scraping and indexing’.
I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular type of problem.
Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to figure it all out from books.
I've always felt a little odd saying, "Back in my day we had to understand the cpu, registers, etc." It's a true statement, but doesn't help in any way. Is that stuff still worth knowing, IMHO? Yes. Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today? Absolutely.
We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything?
My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to understand what it’s been doing for the last five minutes and try to steer it back on course. There is no strife.
I’m only 24 and I think my career would be on a very different path if the LLMs of today were available just five years ago.
At the beginning of the internet, I used to save all webpages where I’d find info, just in case I would be stuck without a connection or if the website removed it. I had parts of the MDN.
The internet never fell. I bet it’ll be the same with AI. You will never not have AI.
The big difference is the internet was a liberation movement: Everything became open. And free. AI is the opposite: By design, everything is closed.
> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.
How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
If you've never put a cupboard together, you would have learned what the different parts, what size of screws to use (in the rough sense),... You may have forget it right after, but when someone ask you to help them, you will be a bit more proficient than someone with no experience.
But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.
I find the opposite is true for me. In my wheelhouse I can use an agent to do a thing, and I can be very critical of the implementation. Outside of my wheelhouse I actually learn quite a lot by watching the agent solve a problem. Since I do have a strong background I am still able to judge the overall approach and identify obvious stupid things the agent tries to do. I would say the code quality is probably a bit worse in those situations than I would have ended up with, but takes about 1/3 of the time. The most difficult part is opening a PR and worrying there might be a couple stupid blips left that I missed, didn’t affect the implementation, but my coworkers are going to look at and ask me wtf I was thinking
Whether we want to accept it or not, we’re now QA. That’s not derogatory, at all.
But I don’t think the answer here is to double down on reading the code and understanding that deeply. We’re rapidly moving past this.
I think the answer is to review the code for very obvious bad choices. But then it’s about proper validation. Check out the app, run the flows, use it for real. Does it _actually_ function?
Or that’s what is working for me. I cannot review all the LOC and I’m starting to feel like I don’t want.
> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software.
I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them.
If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read programs most effectively. And also how to write programs to be most effectively read.
> If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times
I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.
I read other people’s code all the time. I work as a platform engineer with sre functions.
Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself tracing through things or testing during runtime to understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better for this.
On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing with other people. No one is going to get everything right all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands or look things up for me, but we’re trying to figure things out together.
Man it would rule so much if programmers could manage not to be assholes by default so much of the time.
It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling another ignorant.
Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...
For someone to produce that text after growing up in an English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable assumption is that English is not in fact their native language.
Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by default would be a better character trait than not, but still arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit the situation.
I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading someone’s code doesn’t teach me all the wrong ways they attempted before it looked like the way it now does.
I was thinking in situations where a coworker might send me something to review, and I might have thought "hmm, I wouldn't have done it like that, but this is a great way to do it too". Also, a good source of teachable code is to participate in a programming contest, and then review the repositories of the teams who scored better than me after the contest.
I agree that if I don't already know how to implement something, seeing a solution before trying it myself is not great, that's like skipping the homework exercises and copying straight from the answer books.
This is why tutorials in programming don't really teach much because you get the finished version. Not all the wrong steps that were taken, why they failed, what else was tried.
These steps are what help you solve other issues in the future.
This is why I still haven't embraced agents in my work but stick with halfway manual workflow using aider. It's the only way I can keep ownership of the codebase. Maybe this will change because code ownership will no longer have any value, but I don't feel like we're there yet.
I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular type of problem.
Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to figure it all out from books.
I wonder if AI will feel similar.
My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to understand what it’s been doing for the last five minutes and try to steer it back on course. There is no strife.
I’m only 24 and I think my career would be on a very different path if the LLMs of today were available just five years ago.
The internet never fell. I bet it’ll be the same with AI. You will never not have AI.
The big difference is the internet was a liberation movement: Everything became open. And free. AI is the opposite: By design, everything is closed.
How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.
This is what I am still grappling with. Agents make more productive, but also probably worse at my job.
But I don’t think the answer here is to double down on reading the code and understanding that deeply. We’re rapidly moving past this.
I think the answer is to review the code for very obvious bad choices. But then it’s about proper validation. Check out the app, run the flows, use it for real. Does it _actually_ function?
Or that’s what is working for me. I cannot review all the LOC and I’m starting to feel like I don’t want.
If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read programs most effectively. And also how to write programs to be most effectively read.
I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.
Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself tracing through things or testing during runtime to understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better for this.
On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing with other people. No one is going to get everything right all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands or look things up for me, but we’re trying to figure things out together.
Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.
It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling another ignorant.
Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...
For someone to produce that text after growing up in an English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable assumption is that English is not in fact their native language.
Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by default would be a better character trait than not, but still arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit the situation.
Literate programmers indeed.
Maybe he meant "reviewing code from coding agents"? Reviewing code from other humans is often a great way to learn.
I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading someone’s code doesn’t teach me all the wrong ways they attempted before it looked like the way it now does.
I agree that if I don't already know how to implement something, seeing a solution before trying it myself is not great, that's like skipping the homework exercises and copying straight from the answer books.
These steps are what help you solve other issues in the future.