I get what the author is saying here, but I have to respectfully disagree. > I would love to have an assistant who keeps me in check, alerting me to pitfalls a

I get what the author is saying here, but I have to respectfully disagree. > I would love to have an assistant who keeps me in check, alerting me to pitfalls and correcting me when I err. A effective pair-programmer. But that is not what I get. Instead, I have the equivalent of a cocky graduate student, smart and widely read, also polite and quick to apologize, but thoroughly, invariably, sloppy and unreliable. I have little use for such supposed help. > Fascinating as they are, AI assistants are not works of logic; they are works of words. > They have become incredibly good at producing text that looks right. For many applications that is enough. Not for programming. Meyer may be right in that currently LLMs are illogical therefore unsuited to programming complex software, but programmers can still find use from LLMs by delegating to it simple programming tasks like glue scripts. People should use it for small automations, especially those which aren't mission critical so it's okay for it to make a mistake. The kind of would you would delegate to that hypothetical cocky grad student. Meanwhile we have famous programmers like Simon Willison, co-creator Django saying this[0]: > If you're just starting to learn software engineering right now but you're considering dropping it because you think the field might be made obsolete by AI, I have an alternative approach to suggest for you: > Start learning now, and use AI tools to learn FASTER > I wrote about my experiences using ChatGPT and Copilot to help learn Rust back in December > I've since started to get more ambitious - I'm using it for all sorts of other languages, like AppleScript and zsh and jq [0]: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1639692312585572352 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1639692312585572352