[Arun2009]

The west also "forgot" to calculate by hand. Because they invented calculators and computers.

The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.

[dkrich]

This raises a good point. The analogy in the article implies that eventually there will again be a need to know how to write code at a large scale and nobody will know how to do it. I don’t think the analogy holds if you think of AI as a sort of orchestration and abstraction layer which at the end of the day, all software development tools are.

But I do think there’s another thing going on quietly in corporate America currently that will have major ramifications for companies that have prioritized using AI and that is a loss of technical excellence in general.

I can’t put my finger on it but sometime around 2023 or so there was a noticeable falloff in technical competence at companies I work with because the higher ups went all in on a generative AI future. No longer were they investing in training new hires and having rigorous certification standards. Instead people were encouraged to use AI tools to answer questions and would regularly pass off the output to more knowledgeable workers for refinement. These people clearly had no idea whether what they were sending out was accurate or not but it looked and felt like real work.

I think there will be a consolidation across the tech industry and AI will not be a differentiator and only those who are actually competent will succeed but right now AI is allowing a lot of incompetence to go undetected throughout a lot of organizations.