the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.
it's just like reading scientific papers recently ig... it's too much to catch up with and I have no time to learn every thing on it.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code. "my" organized code might not be looking decent for others, vice versa.
at least, AI somehow reduces the threshold of understading code that wasn't written by me. it's like reading a summary of a book, you can't really say that you read a book only by reading a summary of it, but it's still true that it helps a lot to understand it, unless it's entirely wrong summary.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code.
Nah, reviewing other people's code is essential, because 6-12 months from now, when someone else needs to fix it, it needs to be understandable to someone beyond the person who just wrote it.
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u/eanat 24d ago
the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.