I'm guilty here. For years I've been meaning to learn modern webdev, but every time I've sat down to read the docs, tutorials, books, and what have you - I just give up after a couple of hours. Getting seemingly easy stuff done is just a drag.
The other day I decide to try ChatGPT 4o with canvas. For a solid year, I've planned to create some easy membership registration and booking system for this small club I'm part of - just simple stuff to book rooms in a building.
Well, to my absolute amazement - I had a working product up and running after 4 hours of working with ChatGPT. One block at a time, one function at a time. After a day I had built on a bunch of functionality.
So while I'm not completely clueless on back-end programming, my front-end skills are solidly beginner. But it felt like a breeze working with ChatGPT. I think I manually modified at tops 10 lines during all this, everything else was just copy/paste and upload source files to ChatGPT.
Any errors I'd get, I'd either copy/paste, or provide a screenshot.
I actually tried doing something similar when GPT3.5 came out almost two years ago, but it was just too cumbersome then. What I experienced the other day felt lightyears beyond that.
So, did I learn anything ? No - not really. But did it solve a problem for me? yes.
EDIT: But I will add, it did provide solid explanations to any questions I had. Dunno how well it would have worked if my 70 year old mom had tried the same thing, but a gamechanger for people like me.
The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.
>The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
Busy work is work that is assigned merely for the purpose of occupying one's time.
That's not the same thing as practice. We drill children in arithmetic not to keep them busy but because it turns out repeatedly solving multiplication problems is an effective way to teach children their times tables.
When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.
You happened to use an LLM for something that is most prominent in its training data. Do something off its beaten path and correcting all the hallucinations will be more work than just plain old learning it.
You also didn't learn modern webdev for the years you'd been meaning to.
You're actually better poised to learn it now if you care to, now that you have a component you care about that already works that you can work from. Of course maybe you won't, maybe having GPT there will indeed prevent you from ever learning it, I don't know.
„The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop.“
I use AI to ask questions when I am not totally sure what the question is, and it is very helpful for narrowing that down. It can be powerful as a tool to help get your foot in the door on new knowledge. Just like google search there is a correct way to use it and an incorrect way.
Another thing to consider is the motivation of companies like OpenAI. Their products are designed to be used as a crutch. Their money is in total reliance on the product.
If you use a crutch you won’t learn anything is an age old truism. I don’t know why we would think a new tool somehow changes that dynamic.
My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.
She’s also learning to write essays. She writes her essays then puts them into ChatGPT and asks for analysis, feedback, explanatory revisions. Then she revises the essay on her own without being able to refer back to the advice. This is using AI as a complement to learning and it’s been remarkably powerful. She can get feedback immediately, it’s high quality and impartial, and she can do it as many time as she finds useful. So, the fundamentals of learning don’t change no matter how powerful or different the tools become. But ignoring the tools because they can be used in place of learning if used in place of learning is dumb.
> My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.
Which seems silly to me, but what do I know, I'm not a teacher. Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. If I have to divide two numbers I just use a calculator like 99% of the humans on the planet.
Knowing what division is, and what it means to divide one number by another is valuable, but can you just teach that without teaching the mechanics of "divide the partial dividend by the divisor, then multiply the partial quotient by the divisor, and subtract from the partial dividend, extending to the next blah blah blah blah"? Are we really training the next generation for a world without electricity?
I don't think this is true. We learn a lot: Deference. Dependency.
Entitlement. Impatience. Conformity. Distraction. Overconfidence.
Intemperance...
If something "does the thinking for you" it has a much deeper effect
than simply being a "crutch for the mind". It changes our relation to
the world, to knowledge, motives, ambition, self-control...
"AI" is going to change our minds, but from what I've seen so far the
outcome is a really quite awful kind of person, a net burden to
society rather than a creative and productive asset.
That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.
Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework).
Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head.
like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example.
I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance:
Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful.
Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones.
Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach.
Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction.
Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
Everyone crying "calculator" about ChatGPT has me convinced that ChatGPT is bad for your education. Learning to do mental math as a child sucked, but now that I can do it, my brain is so much more free to think about stuff that matters. There's no intervening step of "let me pull out a calculator to see what that is," I just know the answer. The thoughts can just flow freely.
except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does nothing...
The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins.
It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have.
And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time.
And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
> <passive aggressive>
> life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
Aggression against what? Yourself?
I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it
is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for
you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to
take?
Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more
fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life
getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the
hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going
to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not
less labour.
Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so
arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you
employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you
or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
I'm guilty here. For years I've been meaning to learn modern webdev, but every time I've sat down to read the docs, tutorials, books, and what have you - I just give up after a couple of hours. Getting seemingly easy stuff done is just a drag.
The other day I decide to try ChatGPT 4o with canvas. For a solid year, I've planned to create some easy membership registration and booking system for this small club I'm part of - just simple stuff to book rooms in a building.
Well, to my absolute amazement - I had a working product up and running after 4 hours of working with ChatGPT. One block at a time, one function at a time. After a day I had built on a bunch of functionality.
So while I'm not completely clueless on back-end programming, my front-end skills are solidly beginner. But it felt like a breeze working with ChatGPT. I think I manually modified at tops 10 lines during all this, everything else was just copy/paste and upload source files to ChatGPT.
Any errors I'd get, I'd either copy/paste, or provide a screenshot.
I actually tried doing something similar when GPT3.5 came out almost two years ago, but it was just too cumbersome then. What I experienced the other day felt lightyears beyond that.
So, did I learn anything ? No - not really. But did it solve a problem for me? yes.
EDIT: But I will add, it did provide solid explanations to any questions I had. Dunno how well it would have worked if my 70 year old mom had tried the same thing, but a gamechanger for people like me.
The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.
>The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
Busy work is work that is assigned merely for the purpose of occupying one's time.
That's not the same thing as practice. We drill children in arithmetic not to keep them busy but because it turns out repeatedly solving multiplication problems is an effective way to teach children their times tables.
This may be why the practice was invented but I bet there are plenty of teachers who see it more as a way to keep them busy
When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.
I love that AI negativity on HN is so strong that we reclassify whatever work AI can do into “busy work” as soon as it is possible.
You happened to use an LLM for something that is most prominent in its training data. Do something off its beaten path and correcting all the hallucinations will be more work than just plain old learning it.
not true in my experience - of course you have to work within its capabilities but i find it to be a capable partner across large segments of tasks
yep, this is what have found so far.
You also didn't learn modern webdev for the years you'd been meaning to.
You're actually better poised to learn it now if you care to, now that you have a component you care about that already works that you can work from. Of course maybe you won't, maybe having GPT there will indeed prevent you from ever learning it, I don't know.
Technology that renders effort and research pointless makes people lazy and stupid, story at 11
I suppose a headline that doesn't have much to do with the content is also such a technology?
I’m sure there were people that said the same thing about Google. I’m pretty sure they even said the same thing about the written word.
Very misleading title. From the article:
„The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop.“
I feel like this is exactly what the title is conveying. What’s misleading about it?
I use AI to ask questions when I am not totally sure what the question is, and it is very helpful for narrowing that down. It can be powerful as a tool to help get your foot in the door on new knowledge. Just like google search there is a correct way to use it and an incorrect way.
Another thing to consider is the motivation of companies like OpenAI. Their products are designed to be used as a crutch. Their money is in total reliance on the product.
If you use a crutch you won’t learn anything is an age old truism. I don’t know why we would think a new tool somehow changes that dynamic.
My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.
She’s also learning to write essays. She writes her essays then puts them into ChatGPT and asks for analysis, feedback, explanatory revisions. Then she revises the essay on her own without being able to refer back to the advice. This is using AI as a complement to learning and it’s been remarkably powerful. She can get feedback immediately, it’s high quality and impartial, and she can do it as many time as she finds useful. So, the fundamentals of learning don’t change no matter how powerful or different the tools become. But ignoring the tools because they can be used in place of learning if used in place of learning is dumb.
> My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.
Which seems silly to me, but what do I know, I'm not a teacher. Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. If I have to divide two numbers I just use a calculator like 99% of the humans on the planet.
Knowing what division is, and what it means to divide one number by another is valuable, but can you just teach that without teaching the mechanics of "divide the partial dividend by the divisor, then multiply the partial quotient by the divisor, and subtract from the partial dividend, extending to the next blah blah blah blah"? Are we really training the next generation for a world without electricity?
> don't learn anything
I don't think this is true. We learn a lot: Deference. Dependency. Entitlement. Impatience. Conformity. Distraction. Overconfidence. Intemperance...
If something "does the thinking for you" it has a much deeper effect than simply being a "crutch for the mind". It changes our relation to the world, to knowledge, motives, ambition, self-control...
"AI" is going to change our minds, but from what I've seen so far the outcome is a really quite awful kind of person, a net burden to society rather than a creative and productive asset.
Noooooooooooooooooo shit lol
<Shrugs in passive aggressive>
That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.
Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework).
Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head.
like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example.
I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance:
Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones.
Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach.
Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction.
Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
Everyone crying "calculator" about ChatGPT has me convinced that ChatGPT is bad for your education. Learning to do mental math as a child sucked, but now that I can do it, my brain is so much more free to think about stuff that matters. There's no intervening step of "let me pull out a calculator to see what that is," I just know the answer. The thoughts can just flow freely.
except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does nothing...
The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins.
It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
Another possibility: "The register says 99 cents change and I am not paid enough to give any more of a damn than that."
A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed!
Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.
No, I can't agree with you here.
I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have.
And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time.
And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
the difference is I still understand everything the calculator can do, and can do it by hand on paper
the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt
at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards
> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented.
And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?
> <passive aggressive> > life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
Aggression against what? Yourself?
I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take?
Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour.
Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
>To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.