The difference between me copying code and chatgpt is i can understand what the code is doing and not what just matches a statistical association of a string of words.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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What does it mean to understand what the code is doing, that is diametrically opposite from matching statistical association of the commands to the intended outcome
The difference is knowing how you get the answer 2+2 = 4 and not just because people said its "4". Its the ability to reason vs a knowledge store.
You only know it's two because you were taught so. Really, it really is this simple.
New math disagrees.
Yeah, so long as 'new math' is what you call your feelings 😅
AI is just the next level of abstraction. First there was paper tape, then assembly, then C, then C++ and then the higher level OOP languages, JavaScript, and now finally this - natural language. It's the next logical step. And I'm sure at each previous milestone people were having arguments about it much the same as this time.
Thing is, this is the lowest the bar has ever been to get into development - and yet, you still need to understand both what you are asking the LLM to produce and, even more importantly, the output it produces. This second part is in my opinion the most likely aspect to blow up in people's faces.
Don't come crying when the mission critical finance app vibe coded by your MBA suddenly starts erroring out at 3am every second Saturday because your LLM decided to hallucinate a magic number somewhere in your codebase.
...yes?
A (human) coder should definitely be able to think about a novel problem and come up with an algorithm to solve it without copying the algorithm from someone else. Particularly for those circumstances where there isn't any option but to come up with a novel solution.
Pretty sure the joke is that the human in this meme isn't a coder at all.
I took it more as a (very common among coders) joke about how writing code is actually just googling and copying code from Stackoverflow. (Of course it's exaggerated, which is part of why it's, while not completely true, funny.)
Exactly. Me not knowing the language perfectly isn’t the same as me not knowing how to program.
It’s not really any different than looking up the spelling of the word, except in this case a misspelling makes the code inoperative so accuracy is important.
It's true in a lot of fields. TS Eliot (probably) once said "Good writers borrow, great writers steal."
Yeah. I make those. They are very shit though.
Hey hey... at least they're original shit
The good coders are good because they know how to copy and paste. It’s the same as “googling it”. We’re good. We ain’t got nothing to prove to no one. And we know where all the bodies are buried.
Wait... You can do that!? I thought we were all just copying each other's homework.
When it comes down to it we are all copying the basic instruction set, over and over and over.
That's like saying all writing is copying the dictionary.
Yes. Will it be good? No.
Yes lol, if you can't code without copying everything you're cooked.
This reminds me of my all time favorite meme.
Even Sonny knows about Jada.
💀💀💀💀😅
I'm so tired of people who pretend their brains aren't machines. AI is a toddler and it's already impressive. When it's an adult, this pretense will dissolve.
I think a lot of the hostility comes from the fact that AI can and will be used against us. No one actually wants it to succeed because it's an overall loss for us, so people are heavily scrutinizing it in ways that miss the bigger picture imo.
Literally all progress in anything ever can be summarized as "takes fewer people to do the same or more work"
Do they not make the youth do entirely on paper coding tests anymore?
That can still be from memory of code fragments you read earlier.
In that case the only people who program are those who develop new programming languages from the ground up. And maybe not them since they learned how to do it somewhere.
And thus, you've reached the point. Human beings can - theoretically - only generate ideas based on their life experiences. To put it another way, we can only generate output based on data on which we were trained.
Which is why I think it's funny that people hate LLMs for doing exactly what we do.
Children of Memory was a really good book on this topic.
I also tend to hate other people for the same^[though it's more about, them dismissing other's exp, because calling sbd delusional is easier than admitting a problem], so yeah.
My point was that such a belief is patently ridiculous, as ‘nobody codes, actually’ is a ridiculous shape to twist yourself into to accommodate AI slop as being equivalent to human learning.
Yep. Humans are just meat computers.
That was the best way to learn, too… think ahead and write it down with a pen and paper…
And no eraser or liquid paper.
As long as it's pseudocode
lmao look into my post history. chatgpt wrote css code for me today. xD