LLM's are so-so coders but incredible teachers. Today's students get the benefit of asking copying and pasting a piece of code into an LLM and asking, "How does this work?"
There's a lot of young people that will use LLM's to be lazy. There's also a lot that will use them to feed their intellectual curiosity.
When you're a college student, the stakes feel so high. You have to pass this class or else you'll have to delay graduation and spend thousands of dollars. You have to get this grade or else you lose your grant or scholarship. You want to absorb knowledge from this project (honestly! you really do) but you really need to spend that time studying for a different class's exam.
"I'm not lazy, I'm just overwhelmed!" says the student, and they're not wrong. But it's very easy for "I'm gonna slog through this project" to become "I'm gonna give it a try, then use AI to check my answer" and then "I'm gonna automate the tedious bits that aren't that valuable anyway" and then "Well I'll ask ChatGPT and then read its answer thoroughly and make sure I understand it" and then "I'll copy/paste the output but I get the general idea of what it's doing."
I think parent is agreeing with you?
> This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs
The iPhone was an equalizer. Existing mobile devs did get a genuine head start on mobile app design, but their advantage was fleeting.
but i'll say it again, when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again.
listen, the reason why they were in the top in the first place and you aren't is a mindset thing. the top are the curious that are experimenting and refining, sharing with each other techniques developed over time.
the complacent just sit around and lets the world happen to them. they, like you are expressing now, think that when the meta switches the bottom will suddenly find themselves at the top and the top will have nothing.
look around you, that's obviously not how the world works.
but yes, laughing
I do use these tools though! I spent some time with AI. I have coworkers who are more heads-down working on their projects and not tinkering with agents, and they're doing fine. I have coworkers who are on the absolute bleeding edge of AI tools, and they're doing fine. When the tooling matures and the churn lessens and the temperature of the discourse is lowered, I'm confident that we will all be doing great things. I just think that the "anybody not using and optimizing Codex or Claude Code today is not gonna make it" attitude is misguided. I could probably wring out some more utility from these tools if I spent more time with them, but I'd rather spend most of my professional development time working on subject matter expertise. I want to deeply understand my domain, and I trust that AI use will (mostly) become relatively easier to pick up and less of a differentiator as time goes on
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No, the top players when the meta changes in competitive games remain the top players. They also figure out the new meta faster than the casual players.
First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.
Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.