This was a really fascinating project to work on because of the breadth of experiences and perspectives people have on LLMs, even when those people all otherwise have a lot in common (in this case, experienced programmers, all Recurse Center alums, all professional programmers in some capacity, almost all in the US, etc). I can't think of another area in programming where opinions differ this much.
itwasntandy · 21h ago
Thank you Nick.
As a recurse alum (s14 batch 2) I loved reading this. I loved my time at recurse and learned lots.
This highlight from the post really resonates:
“ Real growth happens at the boundary of what you can do and what you can almost do. Used well, LLMs can help you more quickly find or even expand your edge, but they risk creating a gap between the edge of what you can produce and what you can understand.
RC is a place for rigor. You should strive to be more rigorous, not less, when using AI-powered tools to learn, though exactly what you need to be rigorous about is likely different when using them.”
This was a really fascinating project to work on because of the breadth of experiences and perspectives people have on LLMs, even when those people all otherwise have a lot in common (in this case, experienced programmers, all Recurse Center alums, all professional programmers in some capacity, almost all in the US, etc). I can't think of another area in programming where opinions differ this much.
As a recurse alum (s14 batch 2) I loved reading this. I loved my time at recurse and learned lots. This highlight from the post really resonates:
“ Real growth happens at the boundary of what you can do and what you can almost do. Used well, LLMs can help you more quickly find or even expand your edge, but they risk creating a gap between the edge of what you can produce and what you can understand.
RC is a place for rigor. You should strive to be more rigorous, not less, when using AI-powered tools to learn, though exactly what you need to be rigorous about is likely different when using them.”