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by mathieuh
501 days ago
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I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it. Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so. Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer. I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before. |
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AI will let some people conquer skills otherwise out of their reach, with all the pros and cons of that. It is exactly like the example someone else brought up of not needing to know assembly anymore with higher level languages: true, but those who do know it and can internalize how the machines operate have an easier time when it comes to figuring out the real hard problems and bugs they might hit.
Which means that you only need to learn machine language and assembly superficially, and you have a good chance of being a very good programmer.
However, where I am unsure how the things will unfold is that humans are constantly coming up with different programming languages, frameworks, patterns, because none of the existing ones really fit their mental model or are too much to learn about. Which — to me at least — hints at what I've long claimed: programming is more art than science. With complex interactions between a gazillion of mildly incompatible systems, even more so.
As such, for someone with strong fundamentals, AI tools never provided much of a boon to me (yet). Incidentally, neither did StackOverflow ever help me: I never found a problem that I struggled with that wasn't easily solved with reading the upstream docs or upstream code, and when neither was available or good enough, SO was mostly crickets too.
These days, I rarely do "gruntwork" programming, and only get called in on really hard problems, so the question switches to: how will we train the next generation of software engineers who are going to be called in for those hard problems?
Because let's admit it, even today, not everybody can handle them.