| Here’s another reason why to learn code first. AI Code assistants are learning snarky, “read the manual” comments from Substack. I’m sharing this with my students.
On Mar 18, 2025, at 5:42 AM, Toby Hodges via discuss <discuss@lists.carpentries.org> wrote:
Thanks everyone for your feedback so far. Note that the original pull request was merged quickly*, but has since been reverted and a duplicate PR opened to allow more time for discussion. Regarding Paul's question about why I recommended that learners do not use genAI while learning to code, Simon’s response closely echoes my own thoughts.
Please keep the comments coming, either here or on GitHub. I hope to get the changes merged next week.
Cheers,
Toby
* This was my fault: I put a lot of thought into the general communications I was going to send about these changes but forgot to also tell the lesson Maintainers what I had planned 🤦♂️ On 17. Mar 2025, at 11:22, Ken Lacey via discuss <discuss@lists.carpentries.org> wrote:
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I think the reasoning behind the “don’t use AI when you’re learning” comment is that there is a risk that people simply use code that they are given without thinking about it, and therefore don’t build a mental model of what is going on, don’t learn, and hence are unable to spot mistakes by the AI or build more advanced things. In a sense, I think it’s best to think of AI coding assistance as a more advanced version of “look it up on StackOverflow”. We have all come across plenty of people who have done all their coding by copy-pasting snippets from StackOverflow without fully understanding them – as well as people who have laid the groundwork by learning what they are doing first, and *then* looked things up to much better effect. I think this is especially important for a first language – when one is learning programming as well as a particular syntax. That’s my 2p; clearly “don’t use AI” is not enforceable and won’t be adhered to by many, but it’s important that we explain the reason that that advice is given (and maybe consider moderating it to “limit use of AI” or similar) so that hopefully most learners will bear it in mind. -- Assistant Professor of Energy Technologies, Heriot-Watt University Programme lead for MSc Renewable & Sustainable Energy Transition ****************************************************************
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Thank you Toby and all for the discussion it is an important one, at many levels I have always detested coding, comparing it to unnecessary bricklaying vs me being interested in information architectures When AI generated code became available I felt relief, the finally humanity has found a way of avoiding coding by hand My question is: is the AI generated code as good as, better or worse than humanly written code? Having the code written up already means learners must learn how to implement it and run it correctly can it be used to learn/teach about coding more productively - ie engaging learners to Implement debug, test, maniupate, evaluate the ai generated output and how to correct it and improve it, rather than putting their effort into writing AI generated code could allow learners to move straight into the next level of coding, that is implementation Thorough understanding of how the syntax and logic of the program should still be required, but the human intelligence so rare and precious can be spared the tedious task of actually writing it I'm following this ongoing discussion with interest. Great to see this being added to Carpentries material. We recommend that you avoid getting help from generative AI while you learn to code
I was a bit surprised by this negative conclusion. My feeling would be that it isn't reasonable to expect people not to use these tools while learning, and therefore they need to know how to use them safely. And they do seem quite good at explaining code or suggesting different approaches. Here's a slide I used in a recent workshop, although I'm far from 100% happy with it.
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