how LLMs killed computer science

Your gripes come back to professors not being willing to update curriculum to match the new state of the industry and unis just getting away with charging for pedigree. There's no reason why a CS degree cannot change with the times.

agreed they can change and i hope they do i also think that learning "difficult" things on your own is becoming increasingly easier and because of that i imagine lots of ppl will opt out of college to not arbitrarily delay the things they want to do for 4 years

2 minutes of self aggrandizing performative masturbatory fluff before you even start getting to your why. If you’re not learning critical thinking using an llm it isn’t the llm’ss fault

I think we will see a lot of job openings for developers who can fix AI code.

Excellent points in the video. Almost all major LLMs have now "Study/Learn" mode in them. I find it a great way to learn something and internalize the concepts. Thus, my advice is to use these modes as much as possible and really go deep into the rabbit holes. It's too much fun.

Nope. We've been writing code since 1990. That's not how the industry works. We moved from ASSEMBLY to higher-level programming languages without fear of losing our understanding of the binary world. Now Artificial Intelligence is coming for CS as we know it. Get on the train or get off the train.

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I loved stack overflow, learning debugging and contributing there. Nowadays i don’t remember last time I used stack overflow, it’s really hard.

Coding will become an invisible skill - similar to docs/excels/ppts- nobody puts that on a resume, it’s expected you know how to use them. Same is happening to coding :)

Individuals coming into the tech ecosystem need to draw the line when using AI and actually thinking I used to use AI for writing everything from LinkedIn posts to Twitter posts to even emails. Overtime I realised that I could not even compose the simplest of emails I spoke to @lukejacksonn a week after making a change and he agreed with me that AI has really killed the ability for we to think critically Yeah, we do think, but it has diminished our ability to understand complex topics and really digest them. It does not teach you how to fish by default but more or less hands you a fish and teaches you nothing except you want it to Those who don't understand this early would fall behind alot in life as people do value results but if you are of no value and it's all 1s and 0s doing the thinking for you then you are not worth anything This is really my take on it, I don't intend to insult anyone ;)

and the calculator ruined mathematics degrees

Fundamental knowledge always puts you in a place where you can create at the most finite levels. A glossary understanding of these things will leave you crafting what everyone else makes.

When you were solving data structures those researchers and scientists were working day and night to improve LLMs.

Just focus on building things that will actually make a difference in peoples lives or businesses that are very behind technological wise.

Interesting but being the old man yelling at the clouds (me), I can see many parallels to what you're saying is happening now and what's already happened in the past. When I was doing CS, I had no Google. Barely internet (unusable for research). Once G became a thing, and SO, etc. they didn't stop me (or others) from 'thinking', just made it so we were more efficient. Same as you not having LLMs when you were in school. Now, I can see how you say: well LLM's are a completely different beast and wipe the board. Sure. BUT why not look at it from the perspective of: --this is happening at a MUCH faster pace than w/ G or SO so it's much harder to see what I'm talking about (even so, G was lightning fast to appear on the scene...relative to previous tools) --with LLMs, just like w/ G/SO, developers (and the population at large) simply took on harder problems...but this transition took time. At first, yea, people were accused of "cheating" by looking up Bubble Sort on SO. Now, no one cares since no one manually writes Bubble Sort anymore. Give it a few years and, I think, the things developers decide to try and accomplish will look INSANE (cool) from today's perspective - before LLMs came into existence. Shit I did using G/SO -- would be considered impossible as a sole engineer before them...things that would require huge teams to create. Imagine a sole developer using LLMs to create a MMO like Ashes of Creation! In a year! Still would be a metric ton of work, but not impossible. (And yes, small/med/large companies will also accelerate.) No one stopped thinking with G/RO. Everyone will eventually look higher with LLMs. 🙃👍

You cannot delegate what you don’t understand, that’s called entrusting On the other hand I feel it’s always been hugely rewarding to peel a layer of abstraction or two, and have all know people who don’t Might bite before we see the swing back toward sane engineering practices

-Every generation gripes about next -Analog photographers complained about loss of soul in digital -Change is the only constant -Nostalgia fuels passionate rants -The jaded complain about the democratization of intelligence -Computer science is more alive than ever — CS IIT guy

If there’s one thing LLM’s or any of their ilk are not going to be able to do is to eliminate struggle involved in learning. Struggle is not a function of the tool - it is a function of the brain trying to learn. Those who copy answers whether from books (cheating), Google (cheating) and now LLMs(cheating) will never quite become those who have gone thru the pangs of learning More generally, Struggle is endemic to human existence. Meaningful existence, even more so.

I don't think it's only cs , every field student totally relies on llms like med or law , it's just we are going to affect the most coz cs degrees are useless 🫠

Man loved this line: "if you're as good as the tool, you really are as good as the tool".

the video title is the real title. llms didn't kill cs. they removed the penalty for not understanding the fundamentals. now understanding matters more

At the end of the day, it's all about solving a problem and understanding the solution. And it's difficult to understand the solution if it's just fully generated. Maybe better approach would be just splitting a bigger problem to smaller ones.

Endorsing every word of your talk. Taught undergraduate students AI in 1994 (Lisp, Prolog)

LLM's made it the absolute BEST time to get into coding. What it did kill was the old 'get degree get garanteed high paying job' that everyone was expecting. But one-shot developers now can take on projects that they only DREAMED of doing before.

Feel the same way about my mathematics education. Really solidified how to think.

Programmers using AI will replace programmers not using AI

llms didn’t kill comp sci, they jus removed the suffering gatekeeping ritual

I see the point but you are arguing that LLMs wont get better and thats not the case I agree that this could be a house of cards but when gpt7 or Claude 6 drops it will scout codebases and improve all code(better than any human could) so imo it doesn’t matter. Unless you are building critical systems today, but you are talking about students, and by 2027 swe will be totally different than it is today it will just be making claude understand requirements, and being the person to make sure claude do the job properly bc either way by that point claude is better than you. Basically by 2027 we will all be product mangers trusting these claude devs and making them understand requirements I could be wrong but this is the trend im seeing

I have my logo up on your wall. 🥹

I wonder how many people said this before LLMs, due to books, phones, internet, search engines, Stack Exchange ....

I don't exactly disagree.. but I do think that people who used punch cards felt that way about people who started with basic.. and people who hand-coded optimizations in assembler definitely felt that way about people who wrote in Java etc. Prompting is a higher level interface.

Great points. Critical thinking and problem solving are definitely going to become rare skills before the decade is over. Neuroplasticity already tells us that the brain shelves what we don't use.

@grok please summarize.

The field is going to crash at some point, maybe a total reset or back to traditional ways would be necessary at that point

I learnt how to code a little back in 2019. The mistake most people make is letting AI replace them. AI has already replaced their ability to think. It’s a great tool, not a replacement. Looking back at the times when I had to use docs to learn and debug my own code.

The real developer mindset isn't mastered by reading docs, it's a skill you build by shipping stuff. Security? Most devs ignore it until something blows up. Classic 😂