I'm on the same boat, negatively affected by AI. I'm the CEO and founder of an EdTech company and our B2C revenue has greatly decreased as a result of Gen AI.
But unlike the author of this post (or cited authors) I'm not sore. AI is providing a much better education model for students. So it's us that we have to adapt, not complain that the world is changing.
For example, in Machine Learning our projects are sometimes extremely long and repetitive. Because before AI, it was a valuable skill to be able to recall APIs quickly (what is the method to drop duplicates in a dataframe again?).
But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to.
Students can now focus on more high level valuable tasks: understand the domain, compare evaluation methods, compare models, balance tradeoffs, present solutions/reports, etc.
It's like in the 50s when students had to memorize tables of logarithms. Nobody misses that.
We are in the process of recreating all our projects to adapt to the new world. We'll see how it goes.
What a great perspective to have! Completely agree with you and I want to add on to it by saying mentors will always be valuable because students have always had access to information even before AI, if you think about it. It's organizing and packaging it in the right format that's always been the key issue.
" It's organizing and packaging it in the right format that's always been the key issue."
LLms dont help here either.
Part of learning is about struggle. Seems many here want to disregard that fact and just run to the LLM lmao. Yeah you can do that - the knowledge won't really stick.
But it becomes different knowledge. You learn how to manage an LLM to create the thing you need instead of writing code to do the thing you need. Still a learned skill. In some cases, still a struggle.
The initial creativity is still with us, not the LLM. It's the Art/Craft thing - we have the Art, the machine does more of the Craft (and it always did do a fair amount of the Craft).
I'm seeing folks who couldn't (for whatever reason) work out how to code, starting to produce some amazing stuff with the LLM doing the coding now. It's their creativity, their project, their vision, still. The fact that they didn't write the code is meaningless.
I think the goal of (this type of) education is to enable the student to do something, rather than attain some idealised state of knowledge.
> From what I’ve seen, the ability to prompt quality output with AI is entirely proportional to experience and skill level
In my direct experience, it's not my coding skills that I'm using for this. I don't even look at the code any more. It's my experience of developing stuff and managing projects that is enabling me to run the LLM better than a newbie [0]. Teaching someone to code so that they can run an LLM is probably not the most efficient way of doing this.
[0] though I have friends who can't code and are producing better stuff than I am, by just prompting and making mistakes.
santiagobasulto · · focus · HN ↗
But unlike the author of this post (or cited authors) I'm not sore. AI is providing a much better education model for students. So it's us that we have to adapt, not complain that the world is changing.
For example, in Machine Learning our projects are sometimes extremely long and repetitive. Because before AI, it was a valuable skill to be able to recall APIs quickly (what is the method to drop duplicates in a dataframe again?).
But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to. Students can now focus on more high level valuable tasks: understand the domain, compare evaluation methods, compare models, balance tradeoffs, present solutions/reports, etc.
It's like in the 50s when students had to memorize tables of logarithms. Nobody misses that.
We are in the process of recreating all our projects to adapt to the new world. We'll see how it goes.
neya · · focus · HN ↗
e3dd · · focus · HN ↗
LLms dont help here either.
Part of learning is about struggle. Seems many here want to disregard that fact and just run to the LLM lmao. Yeah you can do that - the knowledge won't really stick.
marcus_holmes · · focus · HN ↗
The initial creativity is still with us, not the LLM. It's the Art/Craft thing - we have the Art, the machine does more of the Craft (and it always did do a fair amount of the Craft).
I'm seeing folks who couldn't (for whatever reason) work out how to code, starting to produce some amazing stuff with the LLM doing the coding now. It's their creativity, their project, their vision, still. The fact that they didn't write the code is meaningless.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
From what I’ve seen, the ability to prompt quality output with AI is entirely proportional to experience and skill level.
marcus_holmes · · focus · HN ↗
> From what I’ve seen, the ability to prompt quality output with AI is entirely proportional to experience and skill level
In my direct experience, it's not my coding skills that I'm using for this. I don't even look at the code any more. It's my experience of developing stuff and managing projects that is enabling me to run the LLM better than a newbie [0]. Teaching someone to code so that they can run an LLM is probably not the most efficient way of doing this.
[0] though I have friends who can't code and are producing better stuff than I am, by just prompting and making mistakes.