Post #3261884

2024-01-14 16:48 UTC

When people expect "AI" to do the coding, I think they're not paying much attention to what the hard parts of software development really are. The computer I'm typing on is at least a million times better than where I started. A million times faster, a million times bigger. So much of the work I did then has been automated. But the job hasn't gotten easier, it's just a different kind of hard. Instead of me hacking away solo in my dad's basement, I now am trying to collaboratively build lasting, coherent intellectual works directly with my team and in concert with thousands of other people via libraries, services, and the like. 12/

Replies (1)

@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 16:57

If I need to knock out a little boilerplate in a language I don't understand? Sure, I will happily use a bullshit generator for a chickenshit job. But if I need to build anything that lasts, then I'm going to have to do the work myself, because the major part of the work is in *understanding* the situation (the users, their needs, the team, the history, the code), and carefully improving it, not in just typing shit out. Is it possible that tools can accelerate this? Sure. I've been using an IDE as brain augmentation for 20+ years. I think it would be amazing if I could automate myself out of a job. But at best here I think we'll see some improved autocomplete, and at worst I think we'll see, as we have before, people generating absolute reams of garbage code that other people then have to maintain and clean up. 13/

Open ##3261885