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Copy pasting from stackoverflow has been a meme for almost a decade now. I don't think that destroyed software engineering. Generative AI goes further than that
by typon 3y ago
Copy pasting from stackoverflow has been a meme for almost a decade now. I don't think that destroyed software engineering. Generative AI goes further than that, but fundamentally don't alter software engineering, at least at their current levels of power. You can't give them high level tasks - you have to handhold them. Yes verification is easier than creativity, but I haven't written a sorting algorithm, a Web server, an LRU cache or something similar from scratch in a long time. I reach for a library I know works well. If the LLM helps me write code at a higher level of abstraction than libraries, so what? It's going to be a leaky abstraction just like libraries currently are - the best engineers who can traverse the abstraction hierarchy will still be in demand.
- emmender2 3y ago100% agree. the key is to be able to traverse the abstraction hierarchy all the way from the physics of the hardware to the end-user, and that arguably is what any engineer must learn.