[addicted]

There’s a lot of “people have been complaining about the youth for a long time” in these comments.

I get where that’s coming from. However, I don’t think these complaints are the same.

Let’s not approach this from the youth, but from the technology that’s supposedly corrupting the youth.

Stack Overflow, C compilers, Python are all mentioned as previous examples of technologies that were supposedly making people bad developers. And while true, none of them was hailed as a genuine game changer the way AI is. And why is AI hailed as a game changer? Precisely because AI takes the thinking out of the achieving. It does the thinking for you (it’s right there in the name…artificial INTELLIGENCE).

None of those other technologies pretended to take the thinking out of the achieving.

Now it may turn out that AI is overhyped and it doesn’t actually able to think as well as humans beyond a certain point. But the point still stands that AI, if it exists, is fundamentally different from other technologies and can genuinely have some of those concerning effects on developers that those other techs did not.

[deeg]

Old people have been complaining about the youth for 2000 years but THIS time they're right.

[ethanwillis]

So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?

[motorest]

> So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?

I don't think this is an issue of "the youth", inasmuch it's an issue with "the old" struggling to understand a world where people don't play by their rules anymore.

Pay attention to the absurdity: a blogger complaining that today's junior devs don't do the hard work of... asking questions in stack overflow? That's their baseline of expertise and knowledge-seeking?

I'm old enough to remember "the old" complaining that junior devs can't code anymore because they just paste nonsense they copy from stack overflow.

How times have changed.

[Jensson]

Flynn effect is reversing for this generation, so it doesn't seem to be the same, previously the next generation was always smarter, but now its dumber.

[abenga]

No, but the best of them will generally do great things with the tools they are afforded. Just like all the previous generations.

[deeg]

Always is too strong of a word but if you look at the history of human development I'd say that in general each generation is an incremental improvement over the previous one.

[casey2]

The internet was hailed as and did change the game. Even if we pretend for the sake of argument that AI magically becomes AGI, it still only changes the game about as much as hiring a team. And if it IS that good it certainly doesn't need you managing it.

It's also not as different as you make it out to be. A compiler takes the thinking away from targeting hardware (promise* reality: you still have to target hardware (and software), but you can write larger projects) Likely AI will just become superhuman in various fields, subhuman in many other and won't be AGI for the foreseeable future (barring some kind of massive emergence in VLLMs).

[tbrownaw]

> And why is AI hailed as a game changer? Precisely because AI takes the thinking out of the achieving.

So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?

[mbreese]

That’s not a bad analogy. WYSIWYG is great for almost all use cases. It let people without training in typesetting produce well formatted content quickly. It’s fast and easy. But, sometimes it doesn’t work. Or produces formatting that isn’t quite right. And when that happens, you learn about why things were done differently in the past. Or why markup syntaxes exist as opposed to just WYSIWYG formatted documents.

Or in RAD, you could make pretty good GUI programs quickly that did their job, and did it well. But they would all look very similar. And if you needed a complex interface that required an unsupported workflow, it might not work at all.

Coding with AI can be pretty similar. It will work a lot of the time and you can have something usable quickly. But, if you don’t understand why it works, and something is broken, or misfortunes, you’re stuck. You’ll be left trying to figure out a system without the benefits of knowledge of how or why it worked in the first place.

I’ve seen this with junior developers who don’t understand the languages and tools they use. If they just plug things into AI and hit a wall, they don’t understand the data flow to be able to fix the problem. On the other hand, I’ve also worked with junior devs who have a solid programming background who are able to work faster with AI and still understand/troubleshoot the system. At the end of the day, AI is still a tool (for now) that needs to be used. Some people will use it well…

[motorest]

> So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?

Exactly. One if the killer features of Copilot is even, of all things, tab completion.

Are template engines now bad?