> The result? We’ll have a whole wave of programmers who are more like AI operators than real engineers.
I was a developer for over a decade, and pretty much what I did day-to-day was plumb together existing front end libraries, and write a little bit of job-specific code that today's LLMs could certainly have helped me with, if they'd existed at the time. I agree that the really complicated stuff can't yet be done by AI, but how sure are we that that'll always be true? And the idea that a mediocre programmer can't debug code written by another entity is also false, I did it all the time. In any case, I don't resonate with the idea that the bottom 90% of programmers are doing important, novel, challenging programming that only a special genius can do. They paid us $180k a year to download NPM packages because they didn't have AI. Now they have AI, and the future is uncertain with respect to just how high programmers will be flying ten years from now.
I was a developer for over a decade, and pretty much what I did day-to-day was plumb together existing front end libraries, and write a little bit of job-specific code that today's LLMs could certainly have helped me with, if they'd existed at the time. I agree that the really complicated stuff can't yet be done by AI, but how sure are we that that'll always be true? And the idea that a mediocre programmer can't debug code written by another entity is also false, I did it all the time. In any case, I don't resonate with the idea that the bottom 90% of programmers are doing important, novel, challenging programming that only a special genius can do. They paid us $180k a year to download NPM packages because they didn't have AI. Now they have AI, and the future is uncertain with respect to just how high programmers will be flying ten years from now.