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I will add, too, although less relevant to education than just generally - for all the talk that these tools must be useless and incorrect, that just plainly does not map to my experience using these tools. AI can chew through a debug log on a custom system and pick out root causes on behaviors very effectively, in my experience.

It is just hard to reconcile that denigration of AI with the typical experience I have using these tools in the real world. It is not omnipotent or God, but it can effectively assist in work. There is a certain cognitive dissonance I feel when I walk away from using the tool to help accomplish particular tasks, then hear over and over people say the technology is fundamentally useless and fundamentally does not work. I guess I am just not enough of an academic to understand how something can accomplish work yet fundamentally isn't, somehow.

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In my experience, AI seems like it’s helping debug problems, but it’s very hard to tell when fictional information starts being added. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying AI suggested solutions that I only realized were pointless when I started asking questions like ”I think this distro is missing a package, could that be the problem?” It would agree and tell me a specific package to download. I’d then ask “could iptables be the problem?” It would agree and give me a specific configuration to change.

LLMs can be useful, but I haven’t found a way to use them where I’d be confident in using it to solve technical problems I didn’t already deeply understand.

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why would I as a child ever develop the imagination needed to actively engage with AI tools in the manner you describe? those AI tools take care of the imagining for me.
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