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We need the equivalent investment now. If average code is cheap, then the scarce resource is no longer the ability to produce it. The scarce resource is the ability to read it, to navigate it
You know what would help a lot with understanding the code one is working on? Writing it yourself without turning your brain off via AI.
But that's an insight the article somehow seems to be missing.
I always ask myself how many of these anti ai warriors are actually proficient professional coders. And I'm talking like engineer level, not hobby level.
LLMs are a tool. Give a package power tool to a fool and the result is stupid at best, bloody at the worst. Let's call that vibe tooling and ask if there is a difference to vibe coding.
Imho there is not. LLMs are a tool that can lift up the quality of coding work to a common level if used by proficient people. It helps with searching through and understanding vast outputs as long as you know what to expect. Its a miracle in intuition.
Its not a mind reading tool that will just code your fantasy software for you. Hate it all you like, AI is here to stay, this is like hating cars in the age of horses. Cars are not magic, neither is "AI".
I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those "engineer level" developers you speak of.
Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it's a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns... even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn't have enough context or because something is new.
Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.
Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It's creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.
Wen was the last time you actually wrote something production level yourself?
The goalpost escalation I constantly see in these threads is both hilarious and deeply frustrating.
"You need to be a good dev to use these!" "I am a good dev and these tools suck."
"No like you need to be enterprise level good" "I am an enterprise level dev with credentials far exceeding the baseline offered."
"No but you need to have written code recently!!" "I was writing code yesterday."
I am now waiting for the obligatory "well your coworkers must just be fixing all your code you screw up" because the pro-ai crowd has no argument for the tech not based on "u suk".
AI tools can generate functional, adequate, perfectly average code at a speed and cost that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. And like the outsourcing wave of the early 2000s, the economics are real and rational. Nobody is wrong for using these tools. The code they produce is often fine. It works. It passes tests. It might ship as-is.
Not the first time I've read this kind of statement and I always struggle to reconcile this with my personal experience. I'm seriously doubting that I'm just not a "good enough prompter". I know how to explain context from domain to tech and vice versa, that's like, a good 20% of my job. I'd say that AI tools are good at producing code that already exists.
The LLMs are an interface to a corpus of written material. They've never had a thought, a chat around the coffee machine, or any experience in the largest sense of the world. This is a hard barrier on any induction they may emulate.
