Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer

There have been many new tools. The simplistic DWIM AI coding assistant on my Lisp Machine seemed like magic 40 years ago and perhaps LLMs seem a little magical now.

However they are just tools to get work done faster. I love coding with assistance from Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

I don't even want to know where Next leaves off and React begins, or even where React leaves off and TypeScript begins, or even if I'm using TypeScript or JavaScript. Let AIs handle the miasma that is front-end development. I'll paste it in there, test it, make it as succinct as possible and get it off my plate so I can do something more useful.

This compared to the time I used AI to help with my first Ruby project, where it pointed me to some cool libraries, pushed me to look up amazing functionalities that my PHP-corrupted brain couldn't even conceive of, etc.

I know developers that fret over younger devs that have never even seen assemby and thus do not understand the code they write and so on….

Learn how to use AI to be better and faster than everyone else.

No one in a decade will pay top dollar for a slow dev that knows their handwritten code indside out.

Its all about scale and speed. Now you can argue that it takes the artisanship out of development but truth is, no one cares.

Learn how to use AI to get faster and learn how to teach the AI to be better and more accurate.

They are not coming for the tech jobs, they are already here. Just get on top of them and youll survive.

Same energy

Not really. When I'm doing something new to me, I do not let AI write that code, otherwise how can I evaluate the code that it produces?

Skills You Already Have May Atrophy

Of course they will! Just like they do when you use a library of routines. Nobody writes merge sort outside of their algorithms class. Could I sit down right now and write merge sort? No. Do I care? Not really. Would I let AI write it for me? No - see above: I don't let AI write code I'm not familiar with. I'd prefer to use a library routine and move on. Failing that, I'm going to have to re-implement merge sort. The upshot is since I've implemented before, it'll all come back to me, and I can quickly write it again.

Afterward, I might even let AI take a crack at it and compare its code to my code. I'll use whichever one is best.

You May Become Dependent on Your Own Eventual Replacement

People said that about Intellisense, too. People said that about Code Wizards. I remember when MFC was first released in the early 1990s and with one click of a mouse button it could create a Windows Hello World! program. I remember spending days going through Petzold's book learning how to write a basic Windows program. Now all I have to do is click a button!

On a side note - when is the last time you ever bothered yourself with a windows message pump? Processor caching and branch prediction optimization? How about loop unrolling optimizations? There are times when such knowledge is needed, but I'd wager 90+% of today's programmers have never implemented such things outside of the classroom: if they even did that! And they're not using AI.

Your Code Will Not Be Respected

Are you saying AI-generated code can't pass the Turing test? That's - interesting. You talk about solutions, but in my mind, coding isn't solutioning. That's what architecture and design is for. Coding is implementation. That's why coding is referred to as a craft.

Can AI get good at the craft of coding? That's a question of automation and to answer that question I'll point out there aren't too many black smiths or white smiths around today. Or weavers, for that matter. These are all trades requiring a high degree of knowledge and skill, like coding. And they're mostly gone.

But, mostly gone isn't the same thing as completely gone. People still enjoy learning these trades for fun. Imagine something like Williamsburg for Silicon Valley 100 years from now. The tour guide will explain how people used to write programs. The guests will ooh and aah that people could ever have done such sophisticated tasks. Maybe one of the guests will be intrigued and learn the coding craft.

This has been going on for millennia. The only reason you're scared now is because there are fewer and fewer crafts that can't be automated, and we've built an economic system around scarcity, especially the scarcity of labor. We know from history when such tectonic shifts happen its very disruptive to civilization. Stability is lost and wars are fought. I believe that's what you actually fear, and not AI per se. You fear the change that comes with AI.

On a positive note, you're alive at what will likely be one of the greatest inflection points in human history! How lucky is that?!