| ▲ | mono442 11 hours ago |
| Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time. |
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| ▲ | zjp 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yes. Agents are good at solving densely represented (embarrassingly solved) problems, and a surprising and disturbing number of problems we have are, at least at the decomposed level, well represented. They can even compose them in new ways. But for the same reason they would be unable to derive general relativity, they cannot use insight to reformulate problems. I base this statement on my experience trying to get them to implement Flying Edges, a parallel isosurface extraction algorithm. It’s a reformulation of marching cubes, a serial algorithm that works over voxels, that works over edges instead. If they’re not shown known good code, models will try and implement marching cubes superficially shaped like flying edges. You are still necessary to push the frontier forward. Though, given the way some models will catch themselves making a conceptual error and correct in real time, we should be nervous. |
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| ▲ | operation_moose 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've had the same experience. I do a lot of automation of two engineering software packages through python and java APIs which are not terribly well documented and existing discussion of them on the greater web is practically nonexistent. They are completely, 100% useless, no matter what I do. Add on another layer of abstraction like "give me a function to calculate <engineering value>" and they get even worse. I had a small amount of luck getting it to refactor some really terrible code I wrote while under the gun, but they made tons of errors I had to go back and fix. Luckily I had a pretty comprehensive test suite by that point and finding the mistakes wasn't too hard. (I've tried all of the "just point them at the documentation" replies I'm sure are coming. It doesn't help) |
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| ▲ | arethuza 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you regard a CS degree as vocational training to "code" then perhaps not - but I don't think that's really how people should be regarding a CS degree? |
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| ▲ | mono442 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most people treat higher education as a pass to good paying job and I think it's unrealistic to think otherwise. | | |
| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Most people treat higher education as a pass to good paying job and I think it's unrealistic to think otherwise. Yes, and that's a problem. If the advent of coding agents leads to people that are only in it for the money staying away from higher education - good. Those people are the reason why higher education turned to shit anyway and maybe it will be a nice change when people go into higher ed out of curiosity and not because they smell money. | | |
| ▲ | zelphirkalt 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | On one hand I agree, since I see way too many dispassionate people working in this profession, on the other hand this requires businesses to understand, that a software developer is more than a code monkey. I am not sure we are heading there. Currently, it seems more like many non-IT people think that their monkey imitations are the same that software developers have been doing for years and that they now don't need any good developers any longer. For some CRUD businesses this might even be true. |
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| ▲ | arethuza 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is that "pass" still worth it though? NB I have no idea - ~40 years since I did a CS degree! |
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| ▲ | projektfu 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is there any point in teaching aviation engineering when an LLM could probably generate something that looks reasonable from a corpus existing work? |
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| ▲ | wiseowise 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most “cs” students don’t work in aviation, majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already. | | |
| ▲ | oytis 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already. Not necessarily going to be true by the time current first year students graduate, given that solved problems are most exposed to AI acceleration. | | |
| ▲ | srpablo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's a bit like `rails generate`, where it massively speeds up getting a CRUD webapp 0 to 1, but once you get to GitHub or Shopify size, you need a lot more than that to add a new data model. AIs are pushing many things forward, but due to training sets and context windows, I think meaningfully adding to actually valuable apps, at least as we currently write them (the kind with many DBs/caches/message queues, services) will take a fair bit longer. | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why wound it change? | | |
| ▲ | oytis 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because the companies doing these will either not employ as many people as they do now or will cease to exist altogether since their customers will not need their services |
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| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Depends on whether one wants to be a software engineer or a mere LLM operator. To be fair to the parent poster, many people do seem to aspire only to be LLM operators, who will be a dime-a-dozen commodities accorded even less respect and pay than the average developer is today. |
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| ▲ | ModernMech 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Computer science and coding are as related as physics and writing. If your thesis is the LLM can replace all of science then you have more faith in them than I do. If anything the LLM accelerates computer science and frees it from the perception that it is coding. |