… One odd thing I’ve noticed about the people who are very enthusiastic about the use of LLMs in programming is that they appear to be unaware of any _other_ programming tools. Like, this is a solved problem, more or less; code-aware editors have been a thing since the 90s (maybe before?)

> code-aware editors have been a thing since the 90s

These will do things like highlight places where you're trying to call a method that isn't defined on the object, but they don't understand the intent of what you're trying to do. The latter is actually important in terms of being able to point you toward the correct solution.

true.. in the past few days I used my time off to work on my hobby video game - writing the game logic required me to consider problems that, are quite self-contained and domain specific, and probably globally unique (if not particularly complex).

I started out in Cursor, but I quickly realized Claude's erudite knowledge of AWS would not help me here, but what I needed was to refactor the code quickly and often, so that I'd finally find the perfect structure.

For that, IDE tools were much more appropriate than AI wizardry.

I don't know of a single person who got so stuck on syntax errors that they quit

Try being a TA to freshmen CS majors; a good 1/3 change majors because they can't handle the syntax strictness coupled with their generally untrained logical mind. They convince themselves it is "too hard" and their buddies over in the business school are having a heck of a lot of fun throwing parties...

Sounds like CS is not for them, and they find something else to do which is more applicable to their skills and interest. This is good. I don't think you should see a high drop out rate from a course as necessarily indicating a problem.

Losing potentially good talent because they don't know how or where to look for mistakes yet is foolhardy. I'm happy for them to throw in the towel if the field is truly not for them, but I would wager that a not-insignificant portion of that crowd would be able to meaningfully progress once they get past the immediate hurdles in front of them.

Giving them an LLM to help with syntax errors, at this stage of the tech, is deeply unhelpful to their development.

The foundation of a computer science education is a rigorous understanding of what the steps of an algorithm mean. If the students don't develop that, then I don't think they're doing computer science anymore.

The use of a LLM in this case is to show them where the problem is so that they can continue on. They can't develop an understanding of the algorithm they're studying if they can't get their program to compile at all.

> Giving them an LLM to help with syntax errors, at this stage of the tech, is deeply unhelpful to their development.

I mean if the alternative is quitting entirely because they can't see that they've mixed tabs with spaces, then yes, it's very very helpful to their development.

Hi. Now you do.

I dropped out of cs half because I didn’t enjoy the coding because they dropped us into c++ and I found the error messages so confusing.

I discovered python five years later and discovered I loved coding.

( the other half of the reason is we spent two weeks designing an atm machine at a very abstract level and I thought the whole profession would be that boring.)

Added to which we already have tools that are great at finding syntax errors. They're called compilers.

Compilers can detect errors in the grammar, but they cannot infer what your desired intent was. Even the best compilers in the diagnostics business (rustc, etc) aren't mind-readers. A LLM isn't perfect, but it's much more capable of figuring out what you wanted to do and what went wrong than a compiler is.

none of that is a syntax issue, though, that's semantics

Syntax checking is not an “AI” problem - use any compiler or linter.

I know a lot of people who dropped out of CS in college. Not a single one dropped out because of a semicolon syntax issue.

I spent 8 hours trying to fix a bug once because notepad used smart quotation marks (really showing my age here - and now I'm pretty annoyed that the instructor was telling us to use notepad, but it was 2001 and I didn't know any better).

I did something like that once too, a long time ago. And because of that I see syntax errors of such I’ll within seconds now, having learned once the hard way.

I also know how important the right tools are. I should’ve been using vi.

It amuses me to no end: in college I was a total emacs person, and now I’m a total vi person. There might be dozens of us!

I think both editors have their flaws, I just know the native vi keybindings better at the moment.

Either of them would've made the problem obvious!

This was about a million years ago. I had just installed a pirated copy of Windows XP (FCKGW-RHQQ2...) and was in the first quarter of my physics degree, taking a class in C. Different times....

> think of how many people have probably dropped out of CS as a major after staying up all night and failing to find a missing semicolon.

... like a dozen? And in 100% cases it's their teacher's fault.

They are still worse at finding syntax errors than the actual parser. And at best they could be equally good. So what’s the point?