41–50 of 98 posts
Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"
Also in your analogy the calculator is the compiler :). AI would be someone telling you the numbers to use and you just trust em.
Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"
It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).
Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems
Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction.
But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails.
Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.
What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
I blame the proliferation of MBAs but regardless of cause management killed software engineering as a true craft once they co-opted what agile development means and threw proper testing out the window and wanted devs to become turn key feature factories
But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.
First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters.
Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about programming.
Finally, you're holding up Michelin starred chefs as being inherently better than all other chefs. The Michelin star program is skewed towards one particular end result; to put it in technology terms, it's like grading your business solely on a narrow set of SLOs rather than a holistic understanding.
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
This sort if makes me want to learn Lisp. Maybe if every line packs a lot of punch and you need fewer of them, you can do things AI can't do yet. I think AI would struggle with Lisp since in Lisp, you engineer a language for the task. AI tends to be good on languages it is trained on. For now!