I remember reading an article a while back written by some senior engineer. He was explaining how the new generation of programmers peak in productivity very rapidly in their career because they lack complex problem solving skills and deep programming knowledge. He argued that Google and StackOverflow made it easy to solve problems without thinking deeply about things so it impeded their ability to solve more complex tasks later in their career when Google couldn't do the thinking for them.
If this is true, those new AI tools will probably exacerbate this trend. Fewer and fewer programmers will be able to think deeply about things and the global code base will lose in diversity as people rely more and more on the same AI models to generate code.
As the code loses in diversity, it will also lose in robustness, which increases the risk that something will go wrong for a lot of people all at the same time.
I try to do the thinking myself. Then I'll use one of those tools when I know what I want to write but I'm too lazy to do it.
I don't know man, I was working in the financial industry when 2008 happened. I see a lot of the same patterns and heureustics today in the tech world that led to the 2008 financial crash. When people start using advanced statistics to do the thinking for them, they get real complacent real quick and it rarely ends well. AI has it's limitations and we probably won't find out until we fly too close to the sun and we burn ourselves.
If this is true, those new AI tools will probably exacerbate this trend. Fewer and fewer programmers will be able to think deeply about things and the global code base will lose in diversity as people rely more and more on the same AI models to generate code.
As the code loses in diversity, it will also lose in robustness, which increases the risk that something will go wrong for a lot of people all at the same time.
I try to do the thinking myself. Then I'll use one of those tools when I know what I want to write but I'm too lazy to do it.
I don't know man, I was working in the financial industry when 2008 happened. I see a lot of the same patterns and heureustics today in the tech world that led to the 2008 financial crash. When people start using advanced statistics to do the thinking for them, they get real complacent real quick and it rarely ends well. AI has it's limitations and we probably won't find out until we fly too close to the sun and we burn ourselves.