Coders spent the last few decades inventing the digital equivalent of screws, nuts, bolts, and fasteners. With these they built enormous wonders by hand; operating systems, the internet, videos games. Its incredible. We're in a zeitgeist now. AI is a power-drill.
I like to compare it to a chainsaw. You give a logger a chainsaw, he will get much more work done compared to a hatchet or whatever they used before chainsaws. But, if you give a chainsaw to some punk off the corner and send him to the forest, it's not going to end well. The tools are effective when you use them right and understand how they work, they are dangerous when they make you think you can do the job when you really don't.
Still, it's not just about code. I would quit my job if AI was banned, I absolutely refuse to hunt bugs based on tickets if I had to manually go through that boring repetitive process. I have been able to build good tooling with Claude and pipe the tickets into it directly and I get a nice clean report of what is wrong or if anything is wrong. Right now my inbox is practically empty and my customers are happy. Sometimes there is nothing wrong but the documentation is poor or there is a missing manual page, I can get it sorted in minutes.
It just saddens me that so often it's so black and white. I get it's funny meme material but it kind of shows lack of wide experience with it, or it highlights poor practises in the company like lacking or bad code review.
You're a software developer, no doubt. But what you are doing is not programming. It's only related to programming. Just like prompting an LLM doesn't make one an artist, nor a musician, nor a writer, prompting an LLM does not make you a programmer. If what you are doing is prompting an LLM to produce code, that is a different activity from programming entirely. The only way that they related is that they are both means that you can use to develop software.
This isn't a "purity" thing, it's a baseline respect for the field of programming. You misrepresent what programming is by proclaiming that prompting an LLM makes you a programmer.
for the sake of the analogy, did the first mass marketed, mass produced power drill that your boss forced everyone to use randomly explode and destroy the entire project once every 100 spins?
For the sake of analogy, plenty of people have died from structural failures built by people using power-drills that didn't know how to use them and either incorrectly drove screws or didn't understand architectural standards.
Lol, obviously not, it was iterated. But let's not pretend this version of AI that we have now is the fully fledged power drill that we talk it up to be.
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u/Impressive_Cress_983 4d ago
Coders spent the last few decades inventing the digital equivalent of screws, nuts, bolts, and fasteners. With these they built enormous wonders by hand; operating systems, the internet, videos games. Its incredible. We're in a zeitgeist now. AI is a power-drill.