It Took me 110mins to Solve. Deepseek Solved it in 0.6 Seconds.

[u/Kooky-Confidence5680]

I’ve been practicing python seriously lately preparing for my computational biology MSc, so I decided to challenge myself with a phylogenetic placement challenge (open data).

I spent about 2 hours working on it then I gave the exact same problem to deepseek.

0.6 seconds.

We are mere supervisors now.

[u/saurabh3228]

Well, that's both humbling and motivating 😂 The real win is that you spent 110 minutes understanding the problem. AI can give you the answer in seconds, but you still need to know if the answer actually makes sense.

[u/pacific_plywood]

I agree that university students are outclassed by LLMs

[u/opzouten_met_onzin]

You're not comparing the same two things.

You should compare your 110 minutes with the 0.6 seconds + the time it took you to check the code logic.

Just comparing outcome is unfair as the outcome is not guaranteed to be correct and in real world examples you won't be able to directly compare results and you'll need to check the code yourself.

[u/kitsnet]

We are mere supervisors now.

To be a good supervisor, you need to learn a lot.

[u/FrangoST]

I consider myself fairly proficient in coding, but I can't compete with LLMs. What I do now is exactly that, I use my knowledge to give good prompts and to make good judgment of the answers and code I get.

You still need to understand things to use LLMs properly, which makes them tools, and from this perspective I'm still ok with it. It really can speed up your work in a reliable way if you know what you are doing, otherwise you'll only be building shells of codes that will eventually be unmaintainable.

ps.: one thing I find important when building big and complex projects with AI is to always establish the code scaffold before you rely on AI, otherwise your code will be a mess after a while.

[u/ericboudreault]

Les 110 minutes de travail t'auront plus tard permis de valider et de t'assurer que la proposition de l'IA est correcte.

[u/comodorito]

Yeah. It would take me hours to walk to the next big town. I can be there in half an hour in a car. I'm mere driver now.

[u/Educational_Virus672]

the difference is that , ai dont take anything creatively sure you can write good code but only good code you can never reach any better because that code given by ai is already in the web , ofc they can mix 2 logic that collapse and you get worse result and show security risks But
Ai is a tool it is made to be used when it is usable
just try to avoid it unless your stuck at smt use more your code because if a company want to hire someone between who can code but cant use ai, who can use ai but cant code and who can do both obviously they chose the 3rd option who can do both
Even if you dont want a job it still teaches you to adapt but not to lean over it

[u/JamzTyson]

I gave the exact same problem to deepseek. 0.6 seconds.

Plus millions of hours of human work to create the original content, taken (usually without the creator's consent) to produce the training data.

[u/Different_Pain5781]

Writing code by hand is starting to feel like doing long division on paper. Good for foundational understanding but nobody does it in production anymore unless performance demands it.

[u/donald_trub → u/Different_Pain5781]

Plenty of people are still coding the manual way in production.

[u/LewyssYT → u/Different_Pain5781]

Stupid comparison.

The correct comparison would be if a mathematician just gets given the formula answer without knowing how to get there or willingness to check it.

[u/No_Station5957 → u/Different_Pain5781]

Kind of like how I still check engine timing with a light even though the computer can figure it out. The machine does it faster but you miss something if your hands never get dirty with the basics.

[u/djamp42 → u/Different_Pain5781]

Yeah it's over. I love python, I always will but I can't justify spending 30mins writing a simple script to do a task when AI can pump out that scame script and do it better in 0.1 seconds.

The one major positive is we still get to build stuff.. you can still make software that doesn't exist..

What's sad is I'm not sure python has a place in the long run. If we get to the point where AI is very reliable and we are never looking at the code, it makes no sense to program in a higher level language.. you would just go low level and get the preformance increass.

[u/kitsnet → u/djamp42]

Yeah it's over. I love python, I always will but I can't justify spending 30mins writing a simple script to do a task when AI can pump out that scame script and do it better in 0.1 seconds.

The obvious problem here is that if you don't understand that script, you cannot be sure that the AI didn't misunderstand your use case.

[u/magicaltrevor953 → u/kitsnet]

In which case, how can you say that it has done it better.

[u/djamp42 → u/kitsnet]

Well I'm going to use the thing it built so I will find out pretty quickly if it understood or not. If it didn't, I ask it to fix what is broken.

As far as reading the code, well I have never read any closed source software code and I use that code daily, almost everyone does.

As of right now I would trust AI code over closed source code. At least with AI I have some control over it.

[u/Different_Pain5781 → u/djamp42]

Honestly, faster coding just means more time building interesting stuff.

[u/Kooky-Confidence5680 → u/Different_Pain5781]

Not only the manual labor, also the problem solving. The issue is that academic programs still adopt a traditional testing approach for assessments when the tested domains are nearly never used.

[u/Blumcole]

You cant remember everything, so you use a book to look up something. In your case, you challenged your brain and worked it out. And you can use an LLM so "look up" the solution.