> Sorry but a 99.999% of developers could not have built Unix. Or Winamp.
> Managers are crossing their fingers that devs they hire are no worse than average, and average isn't very good.
The problem is that that's the same skill required to safely use AI tools. You need to essentially audit its output, ensure that you have a sensible and consistent design (either supplied as input or created by the AI itself), and 'refine' the prompts as needed.
AI does not make poor engineers produce better code. It does make poor engineers produce better-looking code, which is incredibly dangerous. But ultimately, considering the amount of code written by average engineers out there, it actually makes perfect sense for AI to be an average engineer — after all, that's the bulk of what it was trained on! Luckily, there's some selection effect there since good work propagates more, but that's a limited bias at best.
Agree completely. Where I'm optimistic about AI is that it can also help identify poorly written code (even it's own code), and it can help rewrite it to be better quality. Average developers can't do this part.
From what I've found it's very easy to ask the AI to look at code and suggest how to make the code maintainable (look for SRP violations, etc, etc). And it will go to work. Which means that we can already build this "quality" into the initial output via agent workflows.
The side effect of a massively increased programmer labor population is that the average skill of the group plummeted.
But back then? Most programmers would not have tried but a substantial portion would have been able to if they did.