Comment by ribosometronome 2 days ago
Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?
Practically, though, how would someone become good at just the skills LLMs don't do well? Much of this discussion is about how that's difficult to predict, but even if you were a reliable judge of what sort of coding tasks LLMs would fail at, I'm not sure it's possible to only be good at that without being competent at it all.
Should you never use a calculator because you want to keep your math skills high?
There are a growing set of problems which feel like using a calculator for basic math to me.
But also school is a whole other thing which I'm much more worried about with LLMs. Because there's no doubt in my mind I would have abused AI every chance I got if it were around when I was a kid, and I wouldn't have learned a damn thing.
I don't use calculators for most math because punching it in is slower than doing it in my head -- especially for fermi calculations. I will reach for a calculator when it makes sense, but because I don't use a calculator for everything, the number of places where I'm faster than a calculator grows over time. It's not particularly intentional, it just shook out that way.
And I hated mental math exercises as a kid.
> I'm not sure it's possible to only be good at that without being competent at it all.
This is, in fact, why we teach kids math that calculators could handle!
> Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?
We don't teach kids how to use an abacus or a slide rule. But we teach positional representations and logarithms.
The goal is theoretical concepts so you can learn the required skills if necessary. The same will occur with code.
You don't need to memorize the syntax to write a for loop or for each loop, but you should understand when you might use either and be able to look up how to write one in a given language.