While I don't disagree and understand the authors concern the bottom line is the author, and others of the same mind, will have to face facts. LLMs are a genie that isn't going back in that bottle. Humans have LLMs and will use them. The teaching angle needs to change to acknowledge this. "You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone. Now I'm going back to school for my degree and classes are taught expecting calculators and even encouraging the use of various math and graphing websites.
By all means urge folks to learn the traditional, arguably better, way but also teach them to use the tools available well and safely. The tools aren't going away and the tools will continue to improve. Endeavour to make coders who use the tools well to produce valuable well written code 2x, 5x, 8x, 20x the amount of code as those of today.
> You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone.
I hear this so often, that I have to reply. It's a bad argument. You do need to learn longhand math - and be comfortable with arithmetic. The reason given was incorrect (and a bit flippant), but you actually do need to learn it.
Anyone in any engineering, or STEM based field needs to be able to estimate and ballpark numbers mentally. It's part of reasoning with numbers. Usually that means mentally doing a version of that arithmetic on rounded version of those numbers.
Not being comfortable doing math, means not being able to reason with numbers which impacts every day things like budgeting and home finances. Have a conversation with someone who isn't comfortable with math and see how much they struggle with intuition for even easy things.
The reason to know those concepts is because basic math intuition is an essential skill.
>t's a bad argument. You do need to learn longhand math - and be comfortable with arithmetic. The reason given was incorrect (and a bit flippant), but you actually do need to learn it.
But...this applies to engineering and/or webdev too. You can't just expect to copy paste a limited solution limited to 4096 output tokens or whatever that would work in a huge system you have at your job, which the LLM has 0 context of.
Smaller problems, sure, but they're also YMMV. And honestly if I can solve smaller irritating problems using LLMs so I can shift my focus to more annoying, larger tasks, why not?
What I am saying is that you also do need to know fundamentals of webdev to use LLMs to do webdev effectively.
> "You need to learn long hand math because you won't just have a calculator in your pocket." Whoopsie! Everyone has a smart phone.
That's a shitty argument, and it wasn't even true back in the day (cause every engineer had a computer when doing their work).
The argument is that you won't develop a mental model if you rely on the calculator for everything.
For example, how do you quickly make an estimate if the result you calculated is reasonable, or if you made an error somewhere? In the real world you can't just lookup the answer, because there isn't one.
This allows you more time to develop a mental model, perhaps not at a learning stage but at a working stage. The LLM shows you what works and you can optimize it thereafter. It will even give you handy inline commentary (probably better than what a past developer provided on existing code).
You still have to manually review and understand every single line of code and your dependencies. To do otherwise is software malpractice. You are responsible for every single thing your computers do in production, so act like it. The argument that developers can all somehow produce 10x or more the lines of code by leaning on a LLM falls over in the face of code review. I'd say at most you'll get 2x, but even that's pushing it. I personally will reject pull requests if I ask the author a question about how something works and they can't answer it. Thankfully, this hasn't happened (yet).
If you have an engineering culture at your company of rubber-stamp reviews, or no reviews at all, change that culture or go somewhere better.
By all means urge folks to learn the traditional, arguably better, way but also teach them to use the tools available well and safely. The tools aren't going away and the tools will continue to improve. Endeavour to make coders who use the tools well to produce valuable well written code 2x, 5x, 8x, 20x the amount of code as those of today.