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Even just "organizing" the code requires great amounts of knowledge and intuition from prior experiences. I am personally torn between the future of LLMs in th

Even just "organizing" the code requires great amounts of knowledge and intuition from prior experiences. I am personally torn between the future of LLMs in this regard. Right now, even with Copilot, the benefit they give fundamentally depends on the coder that directs them - as you have noted. What if that's no longer true in a couple years? How would that even be different from e.g. no code tools or website builders today? In different words will handwritten code stay valuable? I personally enjoy coding so I can always keep doing it for entertainment, even if I am vastly surpassed by the machine eventually.

maccard 2y ago
> Even just "organizing" the code requires great amounts of knowledge and intuition from prior experiences. > I personally enjoy coding so I can always keep doing it for entertainment, even if I am vastly surpassed by the machine eventually. I agree with both these takes, and I think they’re far more important than wondering if hand written code is valuable. I do some DIY around the house. I can make a moderately straight cut (within tolerances for joinery use cases). A jig or circular saw makes that skill moot, but knowing I need a straight clean cut is a transferable skill. There’s also two separate skills - being able to break down and understand the problem and being able to implement the details of the problem. In trade skills we don’t expect any one person to design, analyze, estimate, build, install and decorate anything larger than a small piece of furniture and I think the same can be said of programming. It’s similar to using libraries/framesorks - there will always be people who will write shitty apps with shitty unmaintainable code - we’ve been complaining about that since I’ve been programming. Those people are going to move on from not understanding their wix websites to not understanding their AI generated code. But it’s another tool in the belt of a professional programmer

maccard 2y ago

> Even just "organizing" the code requires great amounts of knowledge and intuition from prior experiences. > I personally enjoy coding so I can always keep doing it for entertainment, even if I am vastly surpassed by the machine eventually. I agree with both these takes, and I think they’re far more important than wondering if hand written code is valuable. I do some DIY around the house. I can make a moderately straight cut (within tolerances for joinery use cases). A jig or circular saw makes that skill moot, but knowing I need a straight clean cut is a transferable skill. There’s also two separate skills - being able to break down and understand the problem and being able to implement the details of the problem. In trade skills we don’t expect any one person to design, analyze, estimate, build, install and decorate anything larger than a small piece of furniture and I think the same can be said of programming. It’s similar to using libraries/framesorks - there will always be people who will write shitty apps with shitty unmaintainable code - we’ve been complaining about that since I’ve been programming. Those people are going to move on from not understanding their wix websites to not understanding their AI generated code. But it’s another tool in the belt of a professional programmer