Can be, but… well, the analogy can go wrong both ways.
This is what Brilliant.org and Duolingo sell themselves on: solve problems to learn.
Before I moved to Berlin in 2018, I had turned the whole Duolingo German tree gold more than once, when I arrived I was essentially tourist-level.
Brilliant.org, I did as much as I could before the questions got too hard (latter half of group theory, relativity, vector calculus, that kind of thing); I've looked at it again since then, and get the impressions the new questions they added were the same kind of thing that ultimately turned me off Duolingo, easier questions that teach little, padding out a progressions system that can only be worked through fast enough to learn anything if you pay a lot.
Code… even before LLMs, I've seen I've worked with confident people with a false sense of understanding about the code they wrote. (Unfortunately for me, one of my weaknesses is the politics of navigating such people).
I'm not trying to be snobbish here, it's completely fine to enjoy those sorts of products (I consume a lot of pop science, which I put in the same category) but you gotta actually get your hands dirty and do the work.
It's also fine to not want to do that -- I love to doodle and have a reasonable eye for drawing, but to get really good at it, I'd have to practice a lot and develop better technique and skills and make a lot of shitty art and ehhhh. I don't want it badly enough.
It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work.
It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the basic concepts.
Many projects do have a kernel of non-obvious innovation, some have a lot of it, and by all means, do think deeply about these parts. That's your job.
But if an LLM can do the clerical work for you? What's not to celebrate about that?
To make it concrete with an example: the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate.
I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding and I would consider doing that myself a terrible use of my time considering all the other things I could be doing.
The alternative wasn't to have a much better TUI, but to not have any.
I think I can reasonably describe myself as one of the people telling you the thing you don't really get.
And from my perspective: we hate those projects and only do them if/because they pay well.
> the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate. I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding...
From my perspective, the core concepts in a TUI event loop are cool, and making one only involves boilerplate insofar as the support libraries you use expect it. And when I encounter that, I naturally add "design a better API for this" to my project list.
Historically, a large part of avoiding the tedium has been making a clearer separation between the expressive code-like things and the repetitive data-like things, to the point where the data-like things can be purely automated or outsourced. AI feels weird because it blurs the line of what can or cannot be automated, at the expense of determinism.
Plus the size of project that an LLM can help maintain keeps growing. I actually think that size may no longer have any realistic limits at all now: the tricks Claude Code uses today with grep and sub-agents mean there's no longer a realistic upper limit to how much code it can help manage, even with Opus's relatively small (by today's standards) 200,000 token limit.
The thing is:
1) A lot of the low-intellectual stuff is not necessarily repetitive, it involved some business logic which is a culmination of knowing the process behind what the uses needs. When you write a prompt, the model makes assumptions which are not necessarily correct for the particular situation. Writing the code yourself forced you to notice the decision points and make more informed choices.
I understand your TUI example and it's better than having none now, but as a result anybody who wants to write "a much better TUI" now faces a higher barrier to entry since a) it's harder to justify an incremental improvement which takes a lot of work b) users will already have processes around the current system c) anybody who wrote a similar library with a better TUI is now competing with you and quality is a much smaller factor than hype/awareness/advertisement.
We'll basically have more but lower quality SW and I am not sure that's an improvement long term.
2) A lot of the high-intellectual stuff ironically can be solved by LLMs because a similar problem is already in the training data, maybe in another language, maybe with slight differences which can be pattern matched by the LLM. It's laundering other people's work and you don't even get to focus on the interesting parts.
Yes, this follows from the point the GP was making.
The LLM can produce code for complex problems, but that doesn't save you as much time, because in those cases typing it out isn't the bottleneck, understanding it in detail is.
GET /svg/weather
|> jq: weatherData
|> jq: `
.hourly as $h |
[$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
`
|> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400 }): `
aes(x: time, y: temp)
| line()
| point()
`
Well, it's both, for different people, seemingly :)
I also like the understanding and solving something difficult, that rewards a really strong part of my brain. But I don't always like to spend 5 hours in doing so, especially when I'm doing that because of some other problem I want to solve. Then I just want it solved ideally.
But then other days I engage in problems that are hard because they are hard, and because I want to spend 5 hours thinking about, designing the perfect solution for it and so on.
Different moments call for different methods, and particularly people seem to widely favor different methods too, which makes sense.
Most math textbooks provide the solutions too. So you could choose to just read those and move on and you’d have achieved much less. The same is true with coding. Just because LLMs are available doesn’t mean you have to use them for all coding, especially when the goal is to learn foundational knowledge. I still believe there’s a need for humans to learn much of the same foundational knowledge as before LLMs otherwise we’ll end up with a world of technology that is totally inscrutable. Those who choose to just vibe code everything will make themselves irrelevant quickly.
It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding.
LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding.
But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's about the self-improvement.