If you are so worried about the next generation’s programming skills, then share your knowledge instead of wringing hands. Indeed teach people how to work with the new tools emerging.

I remember being in that spot, told I should mumble mumble punchcards, and me and my kiddy Debian 1.2 being like “whatever bro! I’ll recompile until it works!”.

these days we call it test driven development…

Let’s figure out the unit testing and Linux of llms and not play greybeard gatekeepers.

#programming

So since I got asked about llms by people I mentor, here is one way to leverage them for self learning.

Ask llms to:

- suggest additional features to build into your toy program
- suggest a list of exercises to learn x

Try to:

- have the llm explain code you wrote / already understand, to get an understanding of what these models make up and how.
- only copy paste the code you think you understand (that’s a slightly more subtle point)

I definitely tell them to turn off copilot entirely.