I was code reviewing some coworker code and it had a really complicated function that took two dates, do aa loop and returned a list with all the months between the two and I asked him why he was using that instead of pd.date_range and it was like that was the solution the AI proposed to me and it worked fine (except that it was causing a bottleneck on his program).
The issue being that one is unlikely to gain the experience necessary to fully leverage the power of the tool, if it’s the primary way to code, because it does too much, to readily…
How many CNC guys have the intuition of an of old school master machinist? Some do, most don’t. Plus, one of those masters can viably run many machines, with an unskilled observer monitoring to catch catastrophic fails. Fewer good jobs because of that. When automaton takes the learning out of the curve, very few people will put in the extra effort to grow beyond what’s needed for minimum viability, with all the knock on consequences that brings.
LLM coding may not kill programming as we know it right now, but I think it’s just a matter of time, just like with US machining/manufacture. Once the learning track to mastery becomes unrewarded, very few will walk it.
I use it to write macros in Excel. It’s awesome because it does the job and saves a ton of time because I don’t know VBA well. Worked fine is fortunately good enough for the things I’m using AI to code.
I was code reviewing some coworker code and it had a really complicated function that took two dates, do aa loop and returned a list with all the months between the two and I asked him why he was using that instead of pd.date_range and it was like that was the solution the AI proposed to me and it worked fine (except that it was causing a bottleneck on his program).
Translation: didn’t understand it.
Then it didn’t work fine.
AI tools don’t make up for lack of skill or experience, but in the hands of a skilled experienced developer can be formidable.
The issue being that one is unlikely to gain the experience necessary to fully leverage the power of the tool, if it’s the primary way to code, because it does too much, to readily…
How many CNC guys have the intuition of an of old school master machinist? Some do, most don’t. Plus, one of those masters can viably run many machines, with an unskilled observer monitoring to catch catastrophic fails. Fewer good jobs because of that. When automaton takes the learning out of the curve, very few people will put in the extra effort to grow beyond what’s needed for minimum viability, with all the knock on consequences that brings.
LLM coding may not kill programming as we know it right now, but I think it’s just a matter of time, just like with US machining/manufacture. Once the learning track to mastery becomes unrewarded, very few will walk it.
AI is just a tool. It’s a shame it’s being billed as a solution.
I use it to write macros in Excel. It’s awesome because it does the job and saves a ton of time because I don’t know VBA well. Worked fine is fortunately good enough for the things I’m using AI to code.
I use it to translate old VBA code into Python.
And the cycle continues.