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by p-e-w 1287 days ago
In my experience, non-programmers lack not only the ability to translate concepts to code, but to formulate those concepts in the first place.

Ask someone who isn't a software engineer to guide you in developing a simple program. You do all the actual coding, they just tell you what they want to happen. You will find that most people are unable to describe even high-level actions in the form of a coherent, procedural sequence.

Even the best code-generating AI won't solve this problem, since it cannot generate useful code if the operator cannot articulate what they actually need.

2 comments

Agreed. The mark of a senior developer is their ability to decouple concepts and synthesize concepts appropriately depending on the context.

You need to have highly developed critical thinking skills in order to be able to formulate appropriate solutions to problems. What a developer does isn't so different from what an entrepreneur does; they spend most of their time explaining their vision and goals; the difference is that the developer's vision and goals are much more granular and detailed.

Not but if AI is able to understand what a non-programmer is trying to accomplish it will do it.
Then we'd automate the non-programmer first.