Jensen Huang says kids shouldn't learn to code — they should leave it up to AI. ( www.tomshardware.com )

OutrageousUmpire , 4 months ago

Disagree. They need to learn to code. And be experts with AI tools.

Just like kids with a calculator.

Pat12 , 4 months ago

I know some Gen Z recent grads who use chatgpt to write their code.

back in my day, we had to write our code ourselves....

silasmariner , 4 months ago

Producer of calculators says kids don't need to learn maths, they just need a calculator

JackGreenEarth , 4 months ago

Well, a lot of maths can be done with a calculator. They don't need to learn to actually understand the maths unless either they actually want to, or they're going into something like engineering.

skvlp , 4 months ago

I disagree. They need to understand math, but not being able to calculate math problems in their head.

dojan , 4 months ago

Absolutely. The calculator is a tool to help you solve a problem. If you don’t understand the problem, then at best you can’t confirm if the answer is correct or not, and at worst the entire exercise is completely lost on you.

The same applies to LLMs. Sure you can get them to spit out code, but unless you understand the code it might be tough to verify that it does what you want. Further, if the code needs adapting (as it often does) then you are shit out of luck if you don’t understand it.

Sure you can ask the LLM to make changes, but the moment something goes wrong in the prompt you have an error sitting there polluting all future output.

wewbull , 4 months ago

Indeed. I've been watching a number of evaluations of different LLMs, where people give it a set of problems and then evaluate the results. The number of times I've seen "Well it got that wrong, but if we let it re-evaluate it, it gets it right". If that's the case, the model is useless. You have to know the right answer before you can ask the model for an answer because the answer you'll get can't be trusted.

Might as well flip a coin.

dojan , 4 months ago

Yeah. I was tasked with evaluating LLMs for software dev at my company last year. Tried a few solutions and tools, and various workflows from just using it as a crutch to basically instructing the LLM to make the application. The former was rarely necessary (but sometimes helpful) and the latter was ridiculously cumbersome.

You need to be specific, and leave no room for interpretation, because the moment you do the latter it'll start making stuff up that doesn't necessarily fit in with the spec, and while you can correct that, that's tedious in and of itself, and once it's already had the idea it'll often have a hard time letting go of it.

I also had several cases where it outright ignored provided context. That was even more frustrating because then it made assumptions that I'd already proven to be false.

The best use cases I got from it was

• Explaining unclear code
• Writing clear documentation (it was really good at this)
• Rubberducking

Essentially, it was a great helper, but a horrendous developer. Felt more like I was tutoring it than anything else.

berg , 4 months ago

In many engineering professions you really need to understand the underlying math to have a chance in hell to interpret the results correctly. Just because you get a result doesn't mean you get an answer.

HeavyDogFeet , 4 months ago

This is objectively stupid. There are tonnes of things you learn in maths that are useful for everyday life even if you don’t do the actual calculations by hand.

yildolw , 4 months ago

They aren't going to catch the typo or order of operations error they made on their calculator if they don't understand the math