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> The ones who do not embrace AI assistants in the near future will have a hard time in the future. The exact opposite will be true and the funny (sad?) part i

> The ones who do not embrace AI assistants in the near future will have a hard time in the future. The exact opposite will be true and the funny (sad?) part is that they will lack the skills necessary (because they got lazy and over-trusted the AI) to fix mistakes/incompatible solutions.

fhd2 3y ago
My thinking as well. If coding assistants become so good that I'm at a competitive disadvantage, I'll just start using them. It's not rocket science. So far, everything I've tried largely slowed me down. As a Google/SO replacement for some types of questions, they sure save me maybe an hour per week, but that's really all I could extract so far. Maybe my work is not too typical though, I spend only a fraction of my time actually typing in code. And I do eliminate the need for boilerplate through other means (picking frameworks/libraries that are a good fit for the problem, refactoring, meta programming, scripts, suitable tool chain etc).
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  1 hour per week of increased coding is a 5-7% boost in productivity, using the Amazon guidelines for how SDEs use their time — 50%/20hrs for SDE1 and 33%/13hrs for SDE3. Is that enough to be competitive? I’m not sure — but at scale that would be a 5% reduction in headcount for the same work, or ~$12M/yr for every 1,000 engineers. If you can figure out how to get 2-3 hours more coding done a week, we’re talking real gains.
  - fhd2 3y ago
    Depends on where the time is saved. If it's in figuring out how to do something in Django where StackOverflow is flooded with outdated answers, sure. I see those kinds of savings. But the tragic beauty of programming is that a little time saved today can very well mean lots of time lost later. The former you can measure, the latter is a tougher nut.
skwirl 3y ago
People said the same thing about garbage collectors.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  And sure enough, people practiced only in garbage collected environments are the ones who struggle most to work with Rust's borrow checker or write sound embedded/IOT code, or to attend to refence leaks in things like event listeners. Did they help people write lots of effective code faster? Yes. Did they breed a generation of people with little intuition around how memory works? Also yes.
  - samatman 3y ago
    This statement boils down to "people who know C or C++ have an easier time learning Rust" which is not especially informative, or even interesting.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  That's a terrible comparison. GC is there to take care of one specific implementation detail in a "good enough" way so that you can focus on more productive work. People are starting to rely on LLMs to do almost everything they've been hired to do for them.

fhd2 3y ago

My thinking as well. If coding assistants become so good that I'm at a competitive disadvantage, I'll just start using them. It's not rocket science. So far, everything I've tried largely slowed me down. As a Google/SO replacement for some types of questions, they sure save me maybe an hour per week, but that's really all I could extract so far. Maybe my work is not too typical though, I spend only a fraction of my time actually typing in code. And I do eliminate the need for boilerplate through other means (picking frameworks/libraries that are a good fit for the problem, refactoring, meta programming, scripts, suitable tool chain etc).

zmgsabst 3y ago
1 hour per week of increased coding is a 5-7% boost in productivity, using the Amazon guidelines for how SDEs use their time — 50%/20hrs for SDE1 and 33%/13hrs for SDE3. Is that enough to be competitive? I’m not sure — but at scale that would be a 5% reduction in headcount for the same work, or ~$12M/yr for every 1,000 engineers. If you can figure out how to get 2-3 hours more coding done a week, we’re talking real gains.
- fhd2 3y ago
  Depends on where the time is saved. If it's in figuring out how to do something in Django where StackOverflow is flooded with outdated answers, sure. I see those kinds of savings. But the tragic beauty of programming is that a little time saved today can very well mean lots of time lost later. The former you can measure, the latter is a tougher nut.

skwirl 3y ago

People said the same thing about garbage collectors.

swatcoder 3y ago
And sure enough, people practiced only in garbage collected environments are the ones who struggle most to work with Rust's borrow checker or write sound embedded/IOT code, or to attend to refence leaks in things like event listeners. Did they help people write lots of effective code faster? Yes. Did they breed a generation of people with little intuition around how memory works? Also yes.
- samatman 3y ago
  This statement boils down to "people who know C or C++ have an easier time learning Rust" which is not especially informative, or even interesting.
dns_snek 3y ago
That's a terrible comparison. GC is there to take care of one specific implementation detail in a "good enough" way so that you can focus on more productive work. People are starting to rely on LLMs to do almost everything they've been hired to do for them.