One post tagged with "ChatGPT"

We all know what I think about ChatGPT, but it seems students cannot get enough of the stuff — the 2024 Stack Overflow survey was overflowing with students who reported using AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Of the people who said they were learning to code, a whopping 63% of them said they used AI tools with an additional 13% saying they were planning to use them in the future. And, of these people, 71% said they thought AI tools "speed up learning".

Yeowzah! I'm not so sure about that last part. While LLM AI tools might make people feel they are being more productive, there is little evidence that this productivity is real. Even if there is some slight boost to productivity, it potentially comes at the cost of reduced code quality over time, and possibly even subtle bugs that would be hard for human code readers to detect. And, given the infancy of commonplace LLM AI tools, there are no studies looking at the long-term impact of the use of these tools on learning — particularly beyond the introductory programming stage and particularly nothing exploring the impact of insane suggestions like teaching prompts first programming.