<story><title>AI copilots are changing how coding is taught</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>surfingdino</author><text>I am skeptical.&lt;p&gt;Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by &amp;quot;AWS devops&amp;quot; (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn&amp;#x27;t set up networking inside AWS. They just didn&amp;#x27;t know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is.&lt;p&gt;Similar things are happening with AI co-pilots. We have an increasing number of people who &amp;quot;write code&amp;quot;, but the number of people who can understand and review code is not increasing. There is also a problem of injecting ethics and politics into those tools, which can produce silly results. I asked Bard to write me a Python function to turn the US Constitution into a palindrome. Bard refused and gave ma a lecture on how the US Constitution is too important to be played with in such trivial fashion. I then asked it to produce code that turns the US national anthem into a palindrome, it refused again. So I asked it do the same but with the Russian national anthem and it spat out code without telling me off. I then asked it to generate code for simple tasks and it did an OK job, except the formatting and the fonts used were different every time, because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student waking up to realise he&amp;#x27;s supposed to hand in the assignment in one hour.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshstrange</author><text>&amp;gt; Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by &amp;quot;AWS devops&amp;quot; (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn&amp;#x27;t set up networking inside AWS. They just didn&amp;#x27;t know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is.&lt;p&gt;I see the same arguments about higher level languages. All of the tech industry is about standing on the shoulders of giants. I do believe that lower level knowledge can help a great deal but using this argument I can say something like:&lt;p&gt;Kids these days don’t know basic assembly, they have no idea what an or&amp;#x2F;and&amp;#x2F;nor&amp;#x2F;xor gate is, they’ve never built a computer from components (no, not cpu&amp;#x2F;mb&amp;#x2F;ram&amp;#x2F;etc, I’m talking transistors and soldering).&lt;p&gt;Maybe LLMs are different but I don’t think they are, they are yet another tool that some people will abuse and some will use wisely. No different from an IDE or a higher-level language in my book.&lt;p&gt;I have next to zero idea how many things I use daily work (like my car for example), it doesn’t stop me from being able to drive where I need to go. I have configured lower level networking equipment in the past and I couldn’t be happier that I don’t have to do that drudgery anymore.&lt;p&gt;All I’m saying is this is a dangerous argument to make because someone can always one-up (one-down?) you. “Oh you had NAT? Luxury! In my day we didn’t even have a network, we had to….” (See also: Four Yorkshiremen [0])&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>AI copilots are changing how coding is taught</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>surfingdino</author><text>I am skeptical.&lt;p&gt;Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by &amp;quot;AWS devops&amp;quot; (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn&amp;#x27;t set up networking inside AWS. They just didn&amp;#x27;t know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is.&lt;p&gt;Similar things are happening with AI co-pilots. We have an increasing number of people who &amp;quot;write code&amp;quot;, but the number of people who can understand and review code is not increasing. There is also a problem of injecting ethics and politics into those tools, which can produce silly results. I asked Bard to write me a Python function to turn the US Constitution into a palindrome. Bard refused and gave ma a lecture on how the US Constitution is too important to be played with in such trivial fashion. I then asked it to produce code that turns the US national anthem into a palindrome, it refused again. So I asked it do the same but with the Russian national anthem and it spat out code without telling me off. I then asked it to generate code for simple tasks and it did an OK job, except the formatting and the fonts used were different every time, because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student waking up to realise he&amp;#x27;s supposed to hand in the assignment in one hour.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>Sounds about right.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m very impressed with the best models — but, because I remember how awful NLP used to be, &amp;quot;very impressed&amp;quot; still means I rate &lt;i&gt;the best&lt;/i&gt; as being around the level of an intern&amp;#x2F;work placement student most of the time, and even at their best still only a junior.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s great, if you&amp;#x27;re OK with that. I&amp;#x27;ve used GPT-3.5 to make my own personal pay-as-you-go web interface for any LLM that&amp;#x27;s API-compatible with OpenAI despite not being a professional Web Developer.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s fairly fragile because it&amp;#x27;s doing stupid things to get the &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; result.&lt;p&gt;Bu that&amp;#x27;s OK, because it&amp;#x27;s for me, I&amp;#x27;m not selling it.&lt;p&gt;(As for the lesser models… I asked one for a single page web app version of Tetris; it started off lazy, &lt;i&gt;then suddenly switched from writing a game in JavaScript into writing a machine learning script in python!&lt;/i&gt;)</text></comment>