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…
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…