Hi. Current CS undergrad here. I find this claim highly disagreeable:
> You learn something about resource allocation from banging out malloc by hand, but not as much as you could if you properly leveraged coding agents.
I think you are underestimating the effectiveness of "reinventing the wheel" to become an effective engineer through the act of building and discovery. Consider common undergrad CS projects: building a compiler, building a file system, building a text editor, or writing an implementation of malloc. Undergrads find these tasks grueling and conceptually challenging, and learn to improve their understanding of computing concepts and software design patterns by struggling to implement these things by hand. If you explain the concepts to an ugrad and then hand them Claude Code to use for the implementation, you are defanging an otherwise significant obstacle that would have stimulated growth.
Undergrads learn by struggling. My friends and I like to say, bombastically, that the only way to teach an undergrad is to torture them.
I would much prefer to learn programming the classical way, and let my employer empower me with LLM technology once I have demonstrated proficiency in software engineering.
I think you are underestimating the effectiveness of "reinventing the wheel" to become an effective engineer through the act of building and discovery. Consider common undergrad CS projects: building a compiler, building a file system, building a text editor, or writing an implementation of malloc. Undergrads find these tasks grueling and conceptually challenging, and learn to improve their understanding of computing concepts and software design patterns by struggling to implement these things by hand. If you explain the concepts to an ugrad and then hand them Claude Code to use for the implementation, you are defanging an otherwise significant obstacle that would have stimulated growth.
Undergrads learn by struggling. My friends and I like to say, bombastically, that the only way to teach an undergrad is to torture them.
I would much prefer to learn programming the classical way, and let my employer empower me with LLM technology once I have demonstrated proficiency in software engineering.