Post #1513690

2026-04-17 01:02 UTC

@csgordon I seriously think the reason some of my students use LLMs to code is because they feel like they know what to write but typing it out with two fingers is too much work. They're also very used to spellcheck and struggle to type correctly without it. Idk if they had computer class, but they definitely didn't master typing before college.

Replies (1)

@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-17 01:21

@samgoree another thing I've been mulling over is comfort with editors, which is sort of a follow-on to touch-typing. I've shocked students by adding a method to every Java class in a file with a one-liner in vim. And of course, to be fair, adding a method to every class in a file by abusing sed-style search-and-replace both requires a deep comfort with syntax and existing program structure, and is objectively a bizarre way to express a conceptually structural change. So it's not exactly an obvious thing to do, even if it's common among long-term vim and emacs users. But when I watch students use their IDEs, even as seniors, I see them do things like use textual find to locate definitions, tabbing through dozens of call sites before hitting the declaration, instead of "just" using the IDE's built-in go-to-definition. To students who don't understand their IDE as anything more than a text editor with a compile&run button (I'm sure some working professionals are in this camp, too), doing complex structural changes quickly by any means must seem magical.

Open ##1513691