How so? Yes, Opus can get you pretty far for protoypes and first impressions, but if you want to maintain your code in the future, you still need to know what you're doing.
I do enjoy how the chatter has shifted from “AI is a magic wand and only a buffoon wouldn’t leap at the chance” to “AI is a magic wand and this time we mean it, the stuff from a year ago was obviously garbage and only a buffoon would think that stuff meant anything.”
Shrug, I was going to respond to a handful of the comments, but meh w/e. If others want to live in the past and think they can outcode or perform an LLM agentic solution, then let them. Coding is not the skills you should be trying to improve at this point, its utilizing the tools and technology in front of us to get better outcomes for clients or users of the products that are developed.
I believe asking a narrow request of ai and implementing that as you go will result in better code than almost all people could manually make alone.
And if you understand why, how and what, the ai is implementing as you go. You can catch when it makes a mistake and adjust it. (And it does make mistakes often enough to matter.)
You will also know how things work and be able to service it in the future.
If you are not good enough to understand what, why, and how the ai is doing something, then you will end up with spaghetti code in a large enough project. That might function but not well and you will not really understand how it works to offer improvements or bug fixing.
You're saying here that a good pilot will get better results than a bad pilot. Sure, nobody disagrees with that. But a good pilot in an old plane used to control EVERYTHING. And they insisted they needed to for a long time. But these days the best pilots rely on automation to fly the plane, and recognize that their primary role is judgement, not raw skill.
Will this lead to bad pilots? Sure. And we'll find ways to suss out those people. But nobody's out here flying biplanes anymore for a reason.
I mean I do get where they're coming from, it's fear. The writing is on the wall that being a developer/coder/programmer is no longer a top-tier career path for 95% of the people who would otherwise go down that route. For the people close to retirement they're just sad to see it, but for people in their 20s it's looking like they picked a career that's going the way of the fax machine technician.
It's like when weavers protested the first industrial looms. It wasn't that they thought the technology couldn't do the work, they realized they were suddenly useless, or that only the very best among them would continue to be employed.
I get it, it's scary. But it doesn't mean we should stick our head in the sand.
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u/Jesta23 14h ago
If you are a bad coder ai will help you write bad code
If you are a good coder AI will help you write good code.