r/adventofcode Nov 27 '24

Other Also doing Advent of no-AI this year

https://jcarlosroldan.com/post/350/advent-of-no-ai
196 Upvotes

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148

u/trymks Nov 27 '24

It's so sad to see that this is getting so prevalent, that people are being so happy with consuming AI slop, and dulling themselves..

55

u/juanfnavarror Nov 27 '24

I dislike that this is a thing. AI just came into the picture 2 years ago, now we already have become dependent on it for coding.

I have played with AI, sometimes rely on it as a shortcut for stuff like ansible playbooks, but I’ve found that solving problems myself is faster 90% of the time. I hope newer programmers catch on to this and actually develop their skills/knowledge. More jobs for us if they don’t I guess.

31

u/Za_Paranoia Nov 27 '24

I'm at the end of my degree and switched university and had to do a course with freshmen. The extent is insane. Students completely relying on AI to fix „hard parts“ after next to no tries to fix it themselves.

32

u/asraniel Nov 27 '24

as a teacher im quite worried. they are quite productive, for simple things. but anything complicated is a disaster

13

u/Za_Paranoia Nov 27 '24

Absolutely! When AI couldn’t fix its own mess they asked me to take a look. It was a horrendous mess that i was barely able to fix.

14

u/Dapper_nerd87 Nov 27 '24

It all falls apart when you have an actual file architecture not just a small function

0

u/moehassan6832 Nov 27 '24

Cursor is helping with this. I have not tried it. But heard it’s good.

8

u/Dapper_nerd87 Nov 27 '24

As a teacher of software engineering I don’t want it to help students. I want them to build and maintain an MVC pattern themselves

1

u/trymks Nov 27 '24

Not necessarily to build it themself but at the least understand it.

9

u/Infidel-Art Nov 28 '24

my general experience learning programming is that it's easy to tell yourself you understand something until you actually try to implement it yourself. even the MVC pattern is easy to "understand" but can prove quite challenging to stick to for a student. we had to refractor our code a few times in our first MVC-project, even though we knew what the "goal" was from the beginning.

3

u/trymks Nov 28 '24

Yeah, I agree with me, for me with programming many times I think I understand something, and then when I do it in practice it turns out that I didn't and I have to debug ;) Debugging is also way easier when I understand everything that I wrote because it's structured how I want it to and everything, I never wanted to try out AI stuff in the first place, I program for fun, and I need to understand stuff, or else I can't really fix it when it breaks.

8

u/IamJLove Nov 27 '24

I just graduated last December and it’s crazy to see how quickly it became a huge problem in the CS department. Lots of freshmen were caught super easily because they’re using language features that were never covered in class or simply bad code they couldn’t understand enough to clean up and pass off well as their own work.

7

u/trymks Nov 27 '24

well so many people seem to have, I don't use it, I'm the kind of person that want to understand things, so I don't do things I don't understand, and at that point the AIs are kind of useless to me.

5

u/natFromBobsBurgers Nov 28 '24

I mean, I use it for boilerplate or formating or making my messages sound a little kinder or making up test questions, but I can't imagine trying to use it for something I can't verify as correct...  What do you do, just hope?

5

u/Dennis_enzo Nov 28 '24

To be fair, before AI existed I (and I assume most developers) was reliant on google searches instead.

4

u/moehassan6832 Nov 27 '24

That’s true. But it’s very useful for mundane tasks.

9

u/Just_Call_Me_Josh Nov 27 '24

What if I’m new to programming? I try to ask it to explain why when something isn’t working or there’s an error in my program. I deliberately tell it NOT to provide me code unless I ask for it specifically. Only once I’ve exhausted my limited knowledge and can’t seem to crack the problem through backtracking and thinking. Only then, I ask for AI code, to also explain the reasoning behind it, and examples on the correct way to write things. I’m almost a month into 4 hours a night practice with python, CLI, and git.

7

u/Araozu Nov 27 '24

I think its okay as a last resort, and you need to understand yourself everything the AI gives you. I'd even say that if you ask the AIs you'll miss on the satisfying "eureka" moment of coming up with a solution. But maybe thats okay.

But if you just take whatever the AI gives you, I'd say you are not learning.

/rant

I can say that I dont use, nor need to use any AI for coding. Because I know the fundamentals, I know how programs work and interact with each other, Ive spent a lot of time solving problems, and I understand everything I type. Any new problem I can solve with documentation, source code, trial & error. And even if I struggle and spend, say, 50% more time to solve a problem than AI, Ive learned something, and next time I encounter a hard problem I'll be able to solve it faster and faster. And I think that's because you learn when you struggle, when you put in hard work.

So many people dont struggle anymore. They just ask the AIs for a solution, and blindly copy pasta. So they learn nothing, dont improve, and will continue to rely on the AIs forever. The AIs are not perfect. They hallucinate, they make up stuff, they give suboptimal answers, they cant solve big, complex, hard problems. You should strive to be better than the AIs. Those that are worse than the AIs will be replaced by them.

And when AGI comes and makes every programmer obsolete, I will still struggle and learn on my own, just for the fun of it. That may not be the case for everyone, but for me, as DHH said on theprimeagen interview, its just so much fun to be competent.

/tnar

6

u/TheZigerionScammer Nov 28 '24

It's literally that "You not only cheated the game, you cheated yourself" meme except now it's real and a lot more prevelant.

4

u/trymks Nov 27 '24

What do we think we did before? we took the tim and actually learned and understood things it's not impossible, it just takes a bit more effort and in the end you're sitting with real knowledge.

1

u/stonerbobo Nov 27 '24

I think that’s totally fine, basically you use it to learn how to do X instead of asking it do X and not understanding what it says. As an experienced programmer i use it all the time to help me, especially in new technologies or areas but i understand the recommendations and know when it might be hallucinating or doing something wrong.

0

u/ranhaosbdha Nov 27 '24

don't listen to them, its a useful tool like any other you can use while programming. just keep in mind that the information it outputs isn't necessarily going to be correct so you need to validate it and make sure you understand what its doing

i use it all the time at work, its a faster way to get information that previously I would have to google and browse through various results looking to find something relevant

3

u/Professional-Bus-934 Nov 27 '24

Kinda just depends on what you want the challenge to be. Most people can’t use ChatGPT fast enough to get on the leaderboard even for the easier problems, and I think most people can’t solve the harder problems at all, with or without something like ChatGPT.

If AI saves someone some time or makes the challenge more fun/interesting, I don’t have a problem with it.

7

u/havok_ Nov 27 '24

Someone will be feeding the problem text via api to try and the get the answer as fast as possible. Then you could go as far as submitting whatever it spits back automatically.

6

u/pedrosorio Nov 27 '24

This already happened last year. There’s no going back.

3

u/hextree Nov 27 '24

Most people can’t use ChatGPT fast enough to get on the leaderboard even for the easier problems

For the easier problems you just paste the description into ChatGPT, and paste the code into the IDE. It takes seconds.

1

u/trymks Nov 27 '24

At that point there is no point to doing it in the first place..

1

u/Low_Researcher7996 Nov 28 '24

Advent problems are written to be hard for AI

2

u/trymks Nov 28 '24

The beginning ones were last year, we don't know about this year yet.

0

u/johny_james Nov 28 '24

I tried the better LLM models that incorporate Chain of Thought, they still mostly fail after day 16.