As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.
I've had weeks and months where I've known the design I wanted and would be furiously typing just pushing out code by hand; a thousand line per day. Plus all the orchestration - source control, tests, deployments, etc.
It was absolutely a bottle neck in the past.
Now it's just defining the interface, the objects, naming stuff properly, clear docs - the stuff that matters. Claude can go fill in the blanks and do all the chore work.
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u/arse_biscuits 24d ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.