I’m just a 1st Year Student

That’s kinda funny. Perhaps, I’m even better than most of my seniors when it comes to programming.

It’s nothing special. Programming is just a small part of the whole work in a project. There’s a lot of things to think about. What matters when programming is writing clean and maintainable code. Of course, we also have new tools at our disposal.

Off to a tangent: I’m thinking something about ChatGPT. It can help one code and it can pretty much regurgitate anything that has been written before. It can rename variables and all those basic pattern understanding when it comes to code. But it can’t make something new. I’ve tried it out on an actual problem that I’ve encountered on my own and it didn’t present any good solutions. Rather, everything that it presented is something that I’ve already thought of, just that I already know those things won’t work. A big problem is its confidence even when it is very wrong. What’s more is it is probabilistic unlike the nature of traditional algorithms being deterministic.

I mean being probabilistic isn’t bad but real understanding is far from just being “probabilistic.” We have things that we can consider only as being absolute in principles and laws. For example, physics. It has very specific rules depending on where we’re looking from and those things don’t really change. Humans have come to understand that fact. That is why, in Earth during the year 2023, no one would doubt that in a normal environment in the surface, that if they jump, they would fall back to the ground. But language models don’t really have that concept of absoluteness do they? They can figure out patterns but it still lacks certain elements that give us the ingeniousity that led to this era.

Well anyways back to college life. I don’t want to sound too overconfident. I don’t want to underestimate people. But, it is simply a matter of truth that I’m better in programming than most in my university no matter what year they are. That’s only true because of my discipline and practice, and the fact that I enjoy problem solving. As much as I wanna say that I’m worlds apart everybody else when it comes to that skill, I still have a long way to go.

I shouldn’t have too much pride on what I can do. Because, it would lead to complacency. This complacency would lead to losing discipline. Without discipline, I can no longer progress thus I cannot improve.

What’s important is to keep on moving forward. No one is infallible. If we pay attention to our mistakes, we will be better. I guess emotions are part of the human ingenuity after all.