[finaard]

> On the one hand, moving from assembly language to C made programmers less effective in some ways and more effective in others. On the other hand, the transition from writing code by hand to using AI is arguably a bigger shift,

I think that's a bad comparison, mainly for two reasons:

We still have people dealing with assembly for building the compilers. We don't quite have that for AI - which became very clear with the claude code leak: We just have people trying to get the correct behaviour, but without understanding why.

The second reason has more practical implications: I generally rely on my compiler to be deterministic, and not introduce security issues (which they sometimes do, by optimising away safeguards placed by the programmer - but that is relatively rare, and we can trace and fix that). But generally as a developer I can rely on my compiler to produce machine or byte code I don't have to think about.

The same is not true for AI - the regularly produce insecure code. This can partially be mitigated by having another AI review it - but it's not a proper solution. Until we get proper AI which can actually understand things we need somebody in the loop who can understand the code.