{"id":1605,"date":"2025-03-13T15:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T19:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/?p=1605"},"modified":"2025-03-13T16:09:11","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T20:09:11","slug":"coding-vs-understanding-the-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/2025\/03\/13\/coding-vs-understanding-the-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Coding vs. understanding the code"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[Click title for image]<\/p>\n<p>Doing is not understanding. Even LLMs seem to know the difference.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve written and spoken a lot about this (<a href=\"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/talks\/mind-the-ai-gap.html\">link to the talk<\/a>). Naturally, <a href=\"https:\/\/forum.cursor.com\/t\/cursor-told-me-i-should-learn-coding-instead-of-asking-it-to-generate-it-limit-of-800-locs\/61132\">the exchange here<\/a> was too good not to share. Here is Claude in Cursor lecturing a user on the difference between having something coded by an LLM vs. coding it yourself so you learn and understand.<\/p>\n<p>The better we separate things we need to understand from things we just need to do, the more effectively we will benefit from LLMs. We certainly can&#8217;t understand everything (nor do we need to), but it&#8217;s a good idea to avoid the illusion of understanding just because we can do it.<\/p>\n<p>To paraphrase Feynman, we can only understand the code we can create.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Click title for image] Doing is not understanding. Even LLMs seem to know the difference. I&#8217;ve written and spoken a lot about this (link to the talk). Naturally, the exchange here was too good not to share. Here is Claude in Cursor lecturing a user on the difference between having something coded by an LLM [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1607,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions\/1621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}