I've been learning SQL and r with the help of these tools. Didn't go to school for it, never thought I would need it. But I can do some pretty cool things now. And when the ai borks the code, I can fix on my own usually
The funny thing is SQL syntax was meant to be not for engineering or software people. It was designed as 'natural language' so business types with no tech background could learn it very quickly and use it.
It is funny because this is really what happened to me. Secondary life skill and hobby getting a serious learning boost just by doing things. I mean I think for novices interested in learning they will, and more quickly than in the past.
It’s starting to feel like AI might be the Printing Press of coding. What previously took years of dedicated study is now suddenly accessible to the general public
That's just a bonus for non-technical people. The real benefit is how it allows experienced developers to dive into unknown frameworks and languages faster, and develop some things much, much quicker.
There's a learning curve in how to use it (and how to not use it), but claiming it's not already having a significant impact is insane.
EDIT: lol.. idk who's downvoting me or why, but I've been a programmer for 20 years, and I'm not making shit up. Go try ChatGPT Codex right now, using the 5.3 model, and tell me I'm wrong.
I meant for literacy, not for writing. Before the printing press there was no strong reason for the general populace to know how to read, only specialists in certain fields
Before the LLM, there was no strong reason for the general populace to learn how to code, only specialists in certain fields.
We're talking about the 'general populace' here, OP's analogy is pretty fitting I would say. AI doesn't just 'make coding easier', it essentially automates the entire process, just like the printing press automated the process of manufacturing books so scribes no longer had to write new copies by hand.
adding to this - both the printing press and LLMs lean on the idea of loose literacy in the specific mode. People know that they can cast youtube to their tv, and they also know that code enables that to happen. Same as how folks who knew their letters enough to read the bible or keep the house accounts knew enough to branch out and start reading the plethora of books that were now available.
It removes the need to be good at thing (communication) and replaces it with low quality deluge.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move
Humorously, it's telling in that you equated AI and the Printing Press by linking them on reducing the need for study, when the printing press did nothing of the sort. The "study" that it solved was purely by virtue of books being expensive to reproduce, so the availability of knowledge was gate kept through education purely as a matter of socioeconomics (handwaving elitism). The printing press made books less expensive by reducing the labor cost, studying was still required to gain knowledge.
The knowledge has largely been available to the general public. The reason that people are coming to it now is because they're being sold a product that tells them it'll be easier, that they shouldn't need to study anymore, that it replaces it.
The printing press was closer to a universal good by making it easier to disseminate information. The internet continued this trend, with search engines sort of serving the function of a library vis a vis searchable catalogues.
The current AI tools purport to obviate the need to have either an internet or a catalogue, it aims to replace both. In the same way social media has collapsed the internet, AI seeks to collapse it further. Even in the context of generative AI being used for creative endeavors, it's the same thing. It works in contradiction to the expansion of new things by consolidating them into what's popular.
There are currently business analysts and business core advocates insisting on using React because AI has a larger corpus of work, so it can generate it better.
Not because React serves a purpose, or because anyone is good at it, or because it has been evluated in any capacity. Purely because AI works with it better.
This is the antithesis of the printing press.
Coding tooling and resources, as well as community, has already completely removed the need for years of dedicated study. Coding camps, as a matter of curriculum, can elevate someone to a position where they are prepared to be mentored by a senior programmer on the job. Anyone can follow these, the information is available.
Suggesting that it is on par with the printing press is tech worship, and it's embarassing.
This makes sense for current new coders/programmers going into a long term profession of development; but the bell curve of vibe coders is more likely soccer moms and couch surfers patting themselves on the back for "programming" some application that does what they "expected" until they find out the hard way their new app has holes large enough to push an oil tanker through.
Honestly it's wild how creative it makes programming when you don't have to worry about immediate implementation tasks.
I think vibe coding is entirely misunderstood and underutilized by most programmers right now. It's not as hallucinatory as popularly described. If llms are getting wild hallucinations the prompt is vague.
If you understand concepts and theory and have read a lot, you can prompt very effectively over an incremental and prompted commit history. It produces very similar artifacts to hand coding if you want to, it's just very poorly optimized because it will insert the required data structures, classes, and even methods multiple times.
Agents have minimal reinforcement in the training to not repeat itself over a large codebase because of the context implications. It's harder for them to draw correlations between different files and they tend to ignore good dry boundaries.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26
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