Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
Why are you interested in CS in the first place? Computer _Science_ will not be affected by LLMs and other technologies at all. I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers). One can reason that - barring development of AGI - that improved AI capabilities won&#x27;t affect the basics that much. Until they can prove P = NP, create entirely novel algorithms or solve the halting problem, we don&#x27;t have to worry on the science front.<p>Now, if you want to go to CS just to get a programming job at some company and you are doing this for money, I would indeed ask you to reevaluate. If you like programming as a hobby, a good way to kill the passion is to turn it into a boring 9&#x2F;5 job. Physics and engineering may use programming as a tool and that may be more interesting to you?<p>That said, LLMs will not make a dent anytime soon. Yes they will plagiarize code and spit it out in a way that&#x27;s similar to what you have requested – and for this very reason, have been banned at my Fortune company (Intellectual property is tricky). But they have no reasoning capabilities, there&#x27;s still demand for solving actual problems. These days, writing code is a fraction of what I do, a lot of work goes into syncing with other teams and figuring out _what to write_. When I actually sit down to write code, that usually takes just a few days. That pales in comparison to all the architecture and coordination work that had to happen to reach that point.<p>Even if we assume that computers will write the code for us and it&#x27;s no problem, that would only save a few days for most of my tasks. And any task where it would save more than that probably isn&#x27;t worth my salary at all.<p>This might heavily affect pure programming outsourcing companies that only write code and require detailed specifications. That might be a true concern for them. Everything else will just adapt to the use of a new tool.<p>Like you mentioned, few people program in assembly these days (although some still tweak and plenty more read assembly) but I don&#x27;t really see anyone complaining about that.