Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

But I empathize with the author. I think the frustration comes from the fact that other folks in your organization use these tools to “get by” more effectively then before. In the past, a disinterested engineer might ship less under the umbrage of a difficult engineering problem. With the pressure to “ship more” now that there’s AI, the same engineer is using AI to spam PRs to prove they’re working, even the quality of work is low (because quality of thought is low).

This is asserted without evidence, and from a scientific standpoint, unjustified.

First, "detect patterns" makes it sound like a classification task, "is this a picture of a cat". But LLMs transform the input.

For example, an LLM can translate text between two languages while properly handling the names of the people described, no matter what those names are. That shows they are representing the text in a somewhat abstract way, that they can perform operations on that representation, and also convert it to useful output.

And, what I just described is the most general form of information processing algorithm. Science is not aware of any limitations in principle on such systems.

I am not saying LLMs have no limits, but "they only recognize patterns, and that is a true limit" is not a good argument.

Only if you instruct it with constraints. Otherwise, it's happy to implement whatever workaround it needs. But it still takes a dev to know what those constraints are and why they're needed.

Plato (who actually wrote these quotes, because Socrates only spoke) wasn't against just "writing" in a general sense, or that he felt it was going to hold humanity back. He was against treatises and felt that someone could "memorize facts" without having to actually think about them on a deep level. Which I think, ironically, is not all that off the mark especially in the age of the internet and now LLMs, right? He also felt that memory could decay if we relied on written facts instead of having dialogues, which again, not all that off the mark, either. He underestimated the compounding capability of technology and our ability to record data and information, but people remember a lot less these days than they used to because we'd largely given up that ability in exchange for the instant information machines.

Of course, he's just one man (or two, if you consider he was conveying Socrates' thoughts, as well) who lived in ancient times and couldn't possibly foresee how technology would evolve...but when I went back and read his concerns, it was ironic to admit that much of what he warned about still applies to this day. People are far less informed despite having access to more information than we've ever had because we've exchanged the ability to remember for the ability to just look things up. And, we also have less meaningful dialog than ever before; people just sit on social media, copying and pasting "facts" to each other, instead of having actual productive discourse. When I look around, the world doesn't seem brimming with mindful critical thinkers and there's reasons for that (many reasons, of course).

AI tooling can be a boon to learning, but it requires us to stop using them for code generation as a primary purpose (at least for juniors) and instead advocate for Socratic workflows that still require manual coding practices. When someone decides to code something, it's not just learning syntax; it engages a variety of mental disciplines from critical thinking to planning to creative problem solving to logic and math, even.