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by KolibriFly 3 days ago
I feel like this is way too binary. I don't have to write every line of code myself to understand the system. I don't write my own compiler HTTP stack or database either

It's more about the level of abstraction. If AI handles 80% of the grunt work and I spend my time on architecture and reviews that's still a win

3 comments

This works for you because you were trained in The Old Way.

Consider the people younger than you. Who are literally shutting their brain off so AI can cheat on their essays and exams. They aren't going to be good architects or code reviewers.

That’s a problem. I work quite a bit with AI now by if I didn’t have a ton of experience writing code myself things would go off the rails quickly. I often have to steer the AI in a different direction from the initial plan it comes up with.
This is some "old man yells at cloud" nonsense.

There will always be proficient programmers who can read and write good as good as yourself. I have 0 reason to believe programmers coming out of University today are any less competent than when you came out of University.

Stanford is proctoring now because current day students could no longer be trusted to not cheat. UC professors are asking for SAT to be reinstated because students aren't prepared well and classes had to get dumbed down to be more remedial on these shortcomings they are bringing.

They are absolutely getting worse. Ask a teacher, at any level.

How about the reason he just explained? Do you disagree that relying on AI to make changes without knowing what it's doing makes you a worse programmer? How would it not?

If you don't know what a good or a bad approach to any problem is because you've never actually had to solve it, you can't even know what being a proficient programmer means, so how could you hope to be one?

This is all fine and dandy until a single line of code somewhere in the stack causes a production outage and management wants to know why it happened. Management won't accept you shrugging your shoulders and saying "the AI did it" for very long.
If my job devolves to reviewing AI code, I'm becoming a plumber.