I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I have no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.
I take comfort in re-reading much of the 70's and 80's literature which focuses the possibilities of user experience. We still haven't fully explored all the dreams of half a century ago.
If AI forces the business case that "code is cheap", I can only hope we re-double our efforts at creating new interfaces and capabilities for computer systems. The Meta glasses, Apple Vision, and the like are small steps in this direction.
But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear. I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is depressing to think about.
For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
There’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.
And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.
"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.
Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were a 10x (or whatever) programmer?
I self-taught myself coding at a young age but I haven't had any identity crisis due to AI. I always saw myself as a software architect, not a coder.
When I was a junior learning to code, I would feel proud of myself because I could remember 100 lines of Windows API code needed to create a new window... But it's been decades since I understood that the real value is not in the code. It's in the architecture. As the author alludes to; the intuition behind the code is what counts.
I think highly competent engineers are often underappreciated because the really clever stuff they do doesn't appear clever at all; it looks deceptively simple. I think what people don't understand is that maintaining simplicity whilst requirements are becoming more complex, is very difficult.
I take comfort in re-reading much of the 70's and 80's literature which focuses the possibilities of user experience. We still haven't fully explored all the dreams of half a century ago.
If AI forces the business case that "code is cheap", I can only hope we re-double our efforts at creating new interfaces and capabilities for computer systems. The Meta glasses, Apple Vision, and the like are small steps in this direction.
For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.
Not exactly symbolic AI, but pretty cool nonetheless.
Yeah, the middle path sounds promising.
"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.
This isn't exactly the same application of a "code mode" as before, but in my view it's a broad philosophy. AI for building machines, instead of doing the work directly. It also allows for easier updates/retries too. https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204 https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089505
When I was a junior learning to code, I would feel proud of myself because I could remember 100 lines of Windows API code needed to create a new window... But it's been decades since I understood that the real value is not in the code. It's in the architecture. As the author alludes to; the intuition behind the code is what counts.
I think highly competent engineers are often underappreciated because the really clever stuff they do doesn't appear clever at all; it looks deceptively simple. I think what people don't understand is that maintaining simplicity whilst requirements are becoming more complex, is very difficult.