If you can, I’d defer to the mid terms. That will say a lot about the direction the country is going in. America has traditionally been a great place to be, and I can’t help but think we will be again in the post-Trump era. It’s just a question of if there will be a post-Trump era or if we’ve already had our last free election.

But I understand two years is a long period of uncertainty. It feels like a decade to me.

You’re not just making sure you write the letters correctly, you’re also following the syntax rules of the language you’re writing. And while you’re writing, you’re reinforcing those rules in your head.

I get where you’re coming from, but I’ve worked with a lot of bad developers who never got the hang of this even as mid-level developers. On the other hand, I understand the utility of knowing how to do these things for ourselves. There are a number of “black-box” libraries that were just an absolute mystery to me until I tried implementing them myself and began to see these libraries are usually not complex so much as they are thorough in covering edge cases that 90% of users will never care about.

It would definitely be a shame if these tools caused new developers to bypass fundamental skill development. My only hesitation is the number of developers who should’ve developed those skills and never did before AI. There’s something wrong either with how developers are learning or who is getting into development.

I spent a couple weeks trying to use CoPilot and at the end I still had to correct its shitty code, which either hallucinated features I wasn’t implementing, or hallucinated syntax rules I wasn’t using.

We are using CoPilot. As a code-completion engine it is handy. I’m much more skeptical about the new code it writes. Like you, I have not had good experiences with that.

Also, I’ve never heard of anyone paying $20 a month for the privilege of not writing in cursive, or being unable to write because they don’t have internet. Something to think about.

You’re right. Tool access is certainly something to think about. I have more nuanced thoughts, but I don’t want to disagree just to disagree, you know?

I agree, but I acknowledge we could be at a “cursive writing” moment where something that was once a critical skill becomes irrelevant. That’s sort of a pending question at this point.

I mean I’ve spent a lot of time writing regex to automate large sets of changes. Sometimes it can be a bit fiddly to get the regex just so. Like replacing direct field access with getters where you have to find the field access and change .foo to .getFoo() and the capitalization can take a couple of tries to get just right.

With AI you can literally just say “replace all direct field access (e.g. thing.foo) with getters and setters” and the AI will do it in under a second. It will still be a very useful skill to be able to do things like that with regex because not everything is so easy to communicate to the AI, but it will become less frequently needed and a lot of developers who never learned that skill will get by using AI and just doing the rare things AI can’t do with repetitive keyboarding.

I asked a question on there about Apache Poi. Then no one answered it so I found a solution and answered it myself. Must’ve stayed relevant because I fielded a few questions about it for years.

Then they took my account away, I think maybe because I didn’t confirm my identity after a big breach? Then I looked for my Q/A and it was attributed to someone else. I was hot about it for a minute and then realized I didn’t care and was finally free from being the expert in that one niche thing I’ve never done since.

To the first part, I agree. A skilled developer who can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff can get a boost out of AI. I’d put it at around 5-10%, but I’ve had some tiny projects where it was 400% boost. I think it’s a small net gain.

As for your second point I just have to disagree. There are no numbers but it is clearly selling the idea of the majority of code being AI generated, and that’s bullshit whether it’s an outright lie with numbers, or merely vaguely misleading. It’s like when someone cuts off the bottom of a graph to make relative change look huge. It wants people to glance at it, get the wrong idea, and move off without curiosity.

That middle graph is absolute fucking bullshit. AI is not fucking ever going to replace 75% of developers or I’ve been working way too fucking hard for way to little pay these past 30 years. It might let you cut staff 5-10% because it enables folks to accomplish certain things a bit faster.

Christ on a fucking crutch. Ask developers who are currently using AI (not the ones working for AI companies) how much time and effort it actually saves them. They will tell you.