By “good” I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?
If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.
After a certain point, learning to code (in the context of application development) becomes less about the lines of code themselves and more about structure and design. In my experience, LLMs can spit out well formatted and reasonably functional short code snippets, with the caveate that it sometimes misunderstands you or if you’re writing ui code, makes very strange decisions (since it has no special/visual reasoning).
Anyone a year or two of practice can write mostly clean code like an LLM. But most codebases are longer than 100 lines long, and your job is to structure that program and introduce patterns to make it maintainable. LLMs can’t do that, and only you can (and you can’t skip learning to code to just get on to architecture and patterns)
I don’t know how to program, but to a very limited extent can sorta kinda almost understand the logic of very short and simplistic code that’s been written for me by someone who can actually code. I tried to get to get chat GPT to write a shell script for me to work as part of an Apple shortcut. It has no idea. It was useless and ridiculously inconsistent and forgetful. It was the first and only time I used chat GPT. Not very impressed.
Given how it is smart enough to produce output that’s kind of in the area of correct, albeit still wrong and logically flawed, I would guess it could eventually be carefully prodded into making one small snippet of something someone might call “good” but at that point I feel like that’s much more an accident in the same way that someone who has memorised a lot of French vocabulary but never actually learned French might accidentally produce a coherent sentence once in a while by trying and failing 50 times before succeeding and then failing again immediately after without ever having even known.
