If you’ve been programming, or learning programming over the past year or so, you should have seen many of the coding assistants… MS Copilot, Claude, Chatgpt and similar. While these have been very handy in looking up how to build a thing – and even building the thing (sometimes successfully!) There are a lot of reasons why you should do the real coding for your project… Or at least read and add your changes and files manually, from a browser vs built in IDE features.
A flashback of example-codes…
Recently I’ve seen how these IDE integrated tools like VS Studio Copilot make things easier… except, when they don’t. I was reminded of a professor years back, who noted that to learn our coding better, and to know the knowledge to pass, we had better enter the code and never copy and paste some example codes or StackOverflow working code.
This is something that applies today to the IDE integrated tools. It may be easier to click a few buttons to make a refactoring change, but you may not see the changes unless you closely look over the code, read over what files changed (They often make some changes that aren’t actually necessary.)
Not only does it cost more to use these fancy IDE based LLMs, these tools may keep one from learning the piece by piece setting of the files that are necessary, including where and how the files interact (views, Activities, Java Classes or other modules.) That would bring more issues later or when coding offline trying to debug or rework features on your apps!
More Thoughts
Adam Lyttle, an experienced ios developer, had an interesting experience with LLM app builder, detailed in his recent video:
I would agree that it makes much of the coding easier, and in some cases makes it “possible” where a project would require quite a bit of some C++/Physics/mathematical processes that are very specialized knowledge these days. but the critical thinking skills are still… critical! 🙂