| My interpretation of this is he feels that AI-assisted programming is okay if you still participate in the programming sometimes, but if you only prompt then you're not really a programmer. Or something. He does say that you should provide more context rather than just repeating yourself. There is a distinction as far as having some engineering skills and knowledge to give the AI hints, but it might be more of a symbolic one than people realize. And as AI continues to improve, that will be more so. But it does bring up a valid point that if we don't do any problem solving or thinking for ourselves, we will be totally helpless. I think this is something that all students should be taught pro-actively. Actually there should have already been a national standard reinforcing to kids what happens to your brain if you don't use it and how important it is to actually read, write and solve problems sometimes rather than feeding everything into an AI. On the other hand, the robustness and general capabilities of ML models continues to improve. We have models that can roughly generate a video game frame-by-frame from a text prompt and input image. How long until we get this for application software? Or a diffusion LLM that just outputs a full WASM source/binary or update from a text prompt or series of images in 4 steps and 5 seconds. I think it could be a really interesting experiment to create a diffusion LLM trained on thousands and thousands of 6502 games and programs, with the full manual (including images) as input and the output being assembly or machine code along with a bit of metadata for RetroArch or something. Or maybe also include recorded gameplay data/visuals. |