My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is <i>coding-adjacent</i>. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.
In chess, engines have long been stronger than humans, but for a long time a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone.
‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.”<p>This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.<p>Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
I'm observing that there is some kind of status quo bias nearly uniformly being surfaced by the programming community right now.<p>I myself have feelings like this, as a software engineer by trade.<p>"We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium.
> Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win.<p>For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.
These posts are just programmers trying to understand their new place in the hierarchy. I'm in the same place and get it, but also truisms like 'will always win' is basically just throwing a wild guess at what the future will look like. A better attitude is to attempt to catch the wave.
TFA's author is literally saying it may happen. He's using AI so he already caught the wave. He's augmenting himself with AI tools. He's not saying "AI will never surpass humans at writing programs". He writes:<p><i>" At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through."<p>You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why.<p>We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day.<p>To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, </i>TODAY*, shortcomings.<p>TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
To be fair, the author phrased his point poorly in a way that invites confusion:<p>> <i>"But for now, real programmers will always win."</i><p><i>"for now ... always"</i>, not a good phrasing.
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