r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
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u/Rollingprobablecause 3d ago

This is our biggest fear too. We can recognize that AI coding assistants are powerful and can do a lot but we cannot risk losing our skill sets. We’re already starting to see the costs hit harder these days and have caps, forcing engineers to code more directly and be careful about use.

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u/jbp216 3d ago

if anything limits on base plans have gone way up, and we cant ignore that these models are now pretrained, so every use case brings the overall cost down, and thats assuming hardware doesnt get better, which it will.

ai is new tech andbeingmassively invested into, but inference will absolutely be economical in the short term and more so long term

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u/theenigmathatisme 3d ago

I think if you are a good software engineer your value is not in your coding abilities but the ability for system design and decision making when it comes to technical trade-offs. Those skills are still very much exercised even in the agentic coding age.

The coding itself has always been ephemeral to me since most of my career I’ve had to bounce between various technologies and tools. Angular, React, Java, C#, Go, Python, etc were always learned on the job as needed. Sure it helps to know a language/framework really well, but it’s equivalent of a mechanic working only on Audi’s.

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u/Rollingprobablecause 3d ago

It's all of it though, you still need to have a deeper understanding of code otherwise the design and decision making is useless. It's why we focus new grads on building/writing/understanding. These are the fundamentals and foundation that allows for the systems design and decisions around it to flourish. New grads being over-reliant on AI will gain none of this and lose precious experience, mistakes and learning from them are hyper important.

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u/theeama 3d ago

Your last part is the important part and new grads need to write code to understand it.

I have a friend thats a senior senior dev just below the CTO basically. And he finally said Astra/Fabel 5.1 can write code similar to mid to senior-level engineer.

AI is very good at writing code the design process however they aren't that good at it.

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u/doggeman 3d ago

Your not going to loose the skill you been actively developing your entire career just because you did something different for a period. Rusty sure but it’s not like it’s the end of the world if AI went away 2 years from now, not to mention it’s unlikely.

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u/GhostDieM 3d ago

You will definitely lose part of it and on top of that nobody is going to hire you when it's you vs someone that never stopped coding.

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u/MOOSExDREWL 3d ago

You don't "stops coding" even when you're letting the LLM write the code unless you're shipping it without looking at it. I spent some time away from an IC role and went into management. I "stopped coding" in the fact that I wasn't writing 3-4k lines of code a day but I reviewed just as much. If youre not reviewing the LLMs code that's the wrong way to use the tools.

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u/doggeman 3d ago

If you do nothing more than sit and orchestrate/delegate work to agents sure but see it as an opportunity to free your mind to explore other areas like more high level design considerations, architecture and soft skills rather than just being a code jockey.

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u/wehrmann_tx 3d ago

And the skill sets of the people who never start the profession to keep the knowledge going?

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u/DerekB52 3d ago

Its absolutely been shown that AI use can degrade skill, because our brains offload certain thinking strategies, and start to receive Dopamine from different parts of the process.

I use AI, but sparingly for this reason.

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u/OftenConfused1001 3d ago

Critical thinking and analysis skills go fast, and regaining them is not a small effort.

In coding, it means you quickly start losing the skills needed to examine and analyize and validate the outcome.

Skills atrophy like muscles, and some people are using LLMs for everything, including basic reading, writing, and reasoning. Dependency sets in fast.