Re:The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate P...
by ryanmcl on Monday March 02, 2026 @09:46AM
(#47218617)
Fair point...I should have said "practically impossible given my constraints" rather than "genuinely impossible." You're right that people have learned from books for decades.
What changed for me wasn't capability, it was feedback loops. A book can't tell me why my specific Stripe webhook is failing at 2am. The combination of AI assistance plus actually building something real kept me from hitting the walls that stopped me the three previous times I tried to learn.
But you're right that the skill existed before the tooling. The tooling just compressed the timeline enough to fit inside the life I already had.
Re:The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate P...
by tricorn on Monday March 02, 2026 @02:56PM
(#47223219)
I think your example highlights one of the places where even the current level of AI can be helpful and enabling, rather than a competitor for jobs, which is helping a person learn something new. Not always in all subjects (do NOT learn to fly a plane solely by AI, I say this as a flight instructor), and the person has to be careful to verify accuracy, but still it can be amazingly useful, and endlessly patient.
Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming?
Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learning on the job is exactly what people have done, always. Is it a good idea? Well, it is always better to have a professional at hand to help and do away with the beginner's problems from the beginning, but it's absolutely doable.
Programming is not a black art, but something anyone with a bit of logical thinking can pick up from a book. Hence the "Learn yourself Java in 48 hours" books the were so popular for a while.