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Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

max.gp

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Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#3
But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code?

Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#6
I haven’t touched LLM coding beyond using TabNine originally and that has since been disabled. My LSP is good enough and I haven’t fallen behind on delivering code before deadlines. Not sure what the constant hype is about.

And look I wrote all that in 1 paragraph without bullet points detailing anything over and over.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#8
I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think makes sense in the architectures I’ve written. Slowly your brain just gets trained to mid thinking like an LLM. At least that’s my theory and I think there was some study that showed that interacting with an LLM at the start of a problem significantly narrowed the solution space to something sub optimal

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#9
post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

Trust creep is the part I worry about too. Today I read every diff.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#10
post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

I think I read so much code over the last 15 years, that its not a thing i will lose.

But at least for me, I really read a lot of code, a lot of PRs from others and evaluated them.

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