Presies.

Having an AI help you code is like getting your six-year-old to help you put a shelf on the wall. Undirected, they're just going to make a huge mess for you to clean up later. Given specific tasks within their abilities, they can actually make it both go faster and be an altogether more pleasant experience.

With direction and an operator who knows its limits, AI can be used to semi-automate many boring tasks. One of the things I've got set up in some of my open source projects is an LLM that takes bug reports and turns them into regression tests. I don't always end up committing the AI-generated test (sometimes it's very slow and I can better pinpoint the behaviour and target a test at that), but it helps because I don't have to do that scaffolding myself, and I can just immediately jump into a debugger.

Yeah, but therein lies the problem

If you don't have new junior devs learning how it all works through trials by fire, we're going to be the last generation of senior devs.

I like llms, they're interesting and can be a real force multiplier. They let you skip the unimportant details and build bigger and faster. You design the system and focus on the architecture, and you get pretty great results

But you can also leave it all up to the ai and create things that no one understands. They're also not going away

But I don't know how we go forward from here. My best idea is that we make it illegal to provide llm access as a service - maybe everyone who uses one should have to set up their stack themselves. It's not a perfect solution, but at least everyone who uses them will have to learn them like they would any other tool in their toolbox

I don't fear AI in the slightest, but I do fear the ways we're using it as a species

Fall behind what
Every single one of you is behind the best coders in the world. Guess you should just give up and take on crochet or pickleball
You're behind, why bother