A machine generating code you don't understand is not the way to learn a programming language. It's a way to create software without programming.
These tools can be used as learning assistants, but the vast majority of people don't use them as such. This will lead to a collective degradation of knowledge and skills, and the proliferation of shoddily built software with more issues than anyone relying on these tools will know how to fix. At least people who can actually program will be in demand to fix this mess for years to come.
Going to arcane websites, forum full of neckbeards to expect you to already understand everything isn’t exactly a great way to learn
The early Internet was unbelievably hostile to people trying to learn genuinely
(not a judgment, just mentioning in case the distinction is interesting to anyone)
Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded.
But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?
I have no idea how an i386 works, let alone a modern cpu. Sure there are registers and different levels of cache before you get to memory.
My lack of knowledge of all this doesn’t prevent me from creating useful programs using higher abstraction layers like c.
There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable.
In the early days of g++, there was no guarantee the object code worked as intended. But it was fun working that out and filing the bug reports.
This new tool is just a different sort of transpiler and optimiser.
Treat it as such.
No, there wasn't: you could just run the shell script, or (a bit later) the makefile. But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you do in your life is time it takes to know something.
So the far more interesting question is: At what level do you want to solve problems – and is it likely that you need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that you could learn instead?
And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're never deployed like that.
Besides, creating software via natural language is an entirely different exercise than using a structured language purposely built for that.
We're talking about two entirely different ways of creating software, and any comparison between them is completely absurd.
They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language.
100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile.
Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9 intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It´s just a matter of time.
Everyone else are deluding themselves. Even the 9front intro requieres you to at least know the basics of nm and friends.
Assembly programmers from years gone by would likley be equally dismissive of the self-aggrandizing code block stitchers of today.
(on topic, RCT was coded entirely in assembly, quite the achievement)
