So Much for ‘Learn to Code’

And the author clearly has no idea what she’s talking about, or the impact of AI on CS.

I use chatgpt regularly to build outlines and boilerplate to code I want to write. Yes it’s code I can’t trust and almost entirely rewrite, but simply the act of it naming the variables saves me time.

And even if it did get to the point of good code, you have to be a developer to know what it created is what you wanted in the first place.

This is fearmongering targeting tech people by claiming their jobs are at the same level of risk of disruption by ai as other white collar jobs (like hers!).

I'm an AI nerd and yes, nowhere close. AI can write code snippets pretty well, and that'll get better with time, but a huge part of software development is translating client demands into something sane and actionable. If a CEO of a 1-man billion dollar company asks his super-AI to "build the next Twitter", that leaves so many questions on the table that the result will be completely unpredictable. Humans have preferences and experiences which can inform and fill in those implicit questions. They're generally much better suited as tools and copilots than autonomous entities.

Now, there was a paper that instantiated a couple dozen LLMs and had them run a virtual software dev company together which got pretty good results, but I wouldn't trust that without a lot more research. I've found individual LLMs with a given task tend to get tunnel vision, so they could easily get stuck in a loop trying the same wrong code or design repeatedly.

(I think this was the paper, reminiscent of the generative agent simulacra paper, but I also found this)

True, as of today. On the other hand, future advancements could very easily change that. On the other other hand, people have been saying the same about self driving cars 10 years ago, and while they do basically work, and are coming eventually, progress there has been a lot slower than predicted.

So who knows. Could go either way.

Yea…anyone who has asked chatgpt to help them fix a piece of code or write one would know it requires a lot of human editing/good prompting. And a lot of time, what I was trying to accomplish still wouldn’t work.

True. But if AI makes people more productive it could make it really hard to find work. Especially if you're straight out of college with zero experience.

Executable and maintainable

AI generated code can’t, as of yet, go in and fix a bug

Part of the problem with telling people "learn to code" is that a lot of them are bad at it. There may be some diamonds in the rough, but there is a lot of rough out there.

I am a very competent developer. Copilot makes me a lot faster with net new code and tests because a lot of that stuff is very close to boilerplate so Copilot can build 95% of it for me. Declarative stuff like HCL is so much faster. Copilot doesn’t necessarily speed me up for things like bug fixes because a lot of that is code reading. Refactoring? Hell yeah. Way faster.

Here’s the study. If you look at the actual prompt (near the end), it’s exactly the kind of thing Copilot kicks ass at: something that’s super fucking common all over GitHub (a toy JavaScript server). I really don’t think my job is in jeopardy yet.

Are these competent developers

Here's an example - a few minutes ago I wrote this line of code:

 undefined

        // date


  

... and a split second later copilot auto completed exactly the seven lines of code that I would have typed. I read the code, tested it, and moved on to the next block of code.

Yes, I could have written those seven lines. They were pretty basic - read a value from the database, transform it to a string human form, and send that the user. CoPilot types a lot faster than me (words per second, instead of per minute) and it makes fewer typos.

It's also more familiar than I am with all the major libraries. I find I'm spending a lot less time reading documentation or searching the web these days.

But the real kicker... I work on a small team. My project is full of code that I didn't write and it isn't as well documented as I'd like it to be. It's also not publicly documented, so I can't use Google or Stack Overflow to find answers. CoPilot has indexed the project, and it knows how to read the date from the database. It also knows what human readable date string format has been used elsewhere in the user interface.

AI is coming for your shitty "journalism" jobs writing about AI taking your jobs.

This is a much better article. OP's article just shows the author's surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There's way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It's a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won't completely subsume a human's ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

Haven't found a usecase for it yet where it doesn't shit out gift wrapped garbage

However, programmers will still be needed to guide AI toward productive solutions

So it would still be safe, they'd just be doing different work from what they do now. Same as how other advances in tech stacks made it so we do things differently now than 30 years ago.

People are very adaptable

It's a multilayered visual pun. A visual punion, if you will.