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I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.

Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.

LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!



Your friends struggle with learning programming because they don't care enough about learning it. You're the only one that cares.

Same can be said for any skill.

Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.

Its intellectual elitism.


Regardless of that. I do think it's true that not anyone can learn it.

But the "elitism" is becoming something that is less and less relevant because people are less needing to learn it anymore thanks AI.


> intellectual elitism

I was trying to say the opposite!! Googling errors for hours is NOT in intellectually demanding task. It’s tedious.


What I have observed is, if you don't know what the issue is, llm would usually suggest something that is unnecessarily complex and not ideal.

It might work but the moment something fails, llm suggest hacks instead of solution.




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