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Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum (thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com)

submitted 2 days ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Recently, a student came into my office. They were having a problem getting their assignment to work. I asked what they had tried, and they said “I tried Claude, I tried Gemini, and I tried ChatGPT.” This was a very concerning interaction to me. What bothered me was not the AI use (which is allowed by course policy), but that the student didn’t have a good process for making progress once they were stuck. As we worked through this student’s problem, it became clear that they were not developing a mental model of what the problem was, or trying to break the problem up into smaller problems, but instead were trying to solve the problem all at once with a single prompt to an LLM. I call this anti-pattern “slot machine programming,” where the student just kept re-using the prompt hoping the next answer would be correct. Similar to playing slot machines, where each play is statistically independent from the last, running the same prompt through different AI tools doesn’t help a student make progress towards a solution.

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

AI can answer many of their questions, but AI can’t help them with the questions they don’t know to ask.

This is a very important thing to understand and one that is difficult to explain to non-technical folks who have a new "super power" where they can magic-up programs (and why hosting their vibe-coded monstrosity on our servers and network may be a bad idea).

This is why when we say "AI is a tool" we need to be careful to add that it's more like "heavy machinery" than a "screwdriver." You need to be checked out on it and understand what it will be doing for you and how to work with it. It's not a tool everyone is readily equipped to work with.

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 15 points 2 days ago

I commented at work that giving the non technical team AI would be like giving toddlers chainsaws.

I got another talking to about making people feel bad.

Bunch of ghouls and whiners here.

[–] hdsrob@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And why students of all people shouldn't be using it.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Maybe - but it's unrealistic to expect. I tutored my high school nephew in a programming class he was taking and practically all of his classmates were using AI to do their homework assignments. The genie is out of that bottle.

College students should at least be taught how to use it and have AIs provided that help them to learn. You can make an AI that helps with the "what questions should you be asking" at least to help them with that insight they haven't developed yet.

For example - I'd recently read about an AI that was created to help grad students with their research proposals. Not in doing the proposal per se but helping them to think about their proposal and whether it was achievable, testable, adds to the corpus of knowledge, etc.