The best results I'm seeing with my own work is mixing agent with my reading of the code and advising. I find it super hard to imagine losing the human view right now. Agents produce good code but they too often don't see bigger structures. They duplicate code and logic and then can't find all the copies if it needs updating, they still need a person to say "make a helper" or whatever.
Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#12I didn't have any friends even before AI.
Do you use your username in IRL? :)
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#13The best results I'm seeing with my own work is mixing agent with my reading of the code and advising. I find it super hard to imagine losing the human view right now. Agents produce good code but they too often don't see bigger structures. They duplicate code and logic and then can't find all the copies if it needs updating, they still need a person to say "make a helper" or whatever.
True, but I can't help but notice how far agents' capabilities have grown in just the past six months, so I assume they'll continue to improve to the point where I tend to, unfortunately, agree with Schmidt. I mourn it also — but I suspect 'code' will take a more representational form. So we can describe it to agents, at least in codebases that mix human and AI written code.
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#14Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#15Perhaps the next great opportunity is to be the person that designs the best process for setting up and running Schmidt’s ‘invisible AI coding sweat shop’.
Running such an operation is going to be multi-faceted. You have to have the know-how to bring in the AI coding assistants. You have to have a very tight framework for quickly specifying tests, and staying ahead of the bots. The integration. The build processes. The source code management. Etc.
Maybe one person can really be that super productive bot overseer, but they’re going to need tools and strong processes.
Building all that seems to be a fertile field.
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#16This is what my employer is pushing as well. Instead of writing code, their vision is to turn developers into AI agent managers. Even if I manage to hold on to my job, whatever creative fulfillment I once got from it will be gone. It's incredibly depressing.
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#17eric schmidt hasn't written code in several decades, i'm not sure why anyone should give anything he has to say on the topic any amount of weight
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#18eric schmidt hasn't written code in several decades, i'm not sure why anyone should give anything he has to say on the topic any amount of weight
[deleted]
Re: Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end
#19I totally get it. What I don’t get is why these perspectives are limited to writing code and not writing or communicating more generally. Just like coding, Eric Schmidt himself is coming to an end. How can smart people not see, writing code is just a canary in the coal mine, a special case that’s only a difference in degree not kind from other sorts of knowledge work?