| > But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me. In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career. There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java. When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses. The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations. But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win. If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic. |
So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at.
On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.
I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.