The AI discussion reminds me of the assembly vs high-level languages (HLL) debate of my youth. The claim was that expert assembly language programmers could wri

The AI discussion reminds me of the assembly vs high-level languages (HLL) debate of my youth. The claim was that expert assembly language programmers could write optimized code that was much faster than compiled code, and therefore HLLs will always be the 'second best'. Obviously, that was a misunderstanding: compilers got so much better that, on average, they beat human assembly programmers, especially on large code bases where careful machine language optimization does not scale. There's still a place for optimized assembly language programming, but it's exclusively in high-performance highly reusable libraries. I think a similar pattern will emerge for AI: it'll be used for routine code, while freeing skilled programmers for algorithm development and similar high-level tasks.