Fuck AI

I was skeptical going into this article. And then I read this:

"Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself," the executive said.

Yeah, this guy doesn't know shit about software development. He thinks he does. But in reality he doesn't. He's yet another C-level guy who's been huffing on his own farts for too long, and is giving off real strong "the Internet is a series of tubes!" vibes.

First of all, I've been hearing this same argument about how the role of software developer is imminently doomed for 10-15 years now. "AI is going to make software developers obsolete within a year!" It's never happened, and for good reason. While generative AI has evolved at a staggering rate over the last 2-3 years, its still not at the point of being able to envision and implement complex, scalable code bases.

Second, I and others I know have tried using Chat GPT and similar to generate working code - even recently, and it's a lot more 'miss' than 'hit'. It's good for spinning up unit test templates and some very basic coding examples. It's decent for getting new perspectives on specific micro code problems. But a lot of nuance is lost in translation, and that means you end up either with as much crap code as good code, or you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to finagle something that's workable. And often it's outright detrimental. Too many times I've seen or heard about less experienced developers trying to use AI and copy-and-pasting AI generated code here there and everywhere and the resulting wider code base becomes like bloated spaghetti shit. You try to blindly cut corners in software development at your own risk.

And this brings me to my final point: there's a very big difference between 'coding' and software development. Coding is coming up with a few lines of code to do one very specific thing. Software development is a holistic process that requires knowledge, experience, intuition, anticipating problems, and seeing the bigger picture.

Eventually I could see AI being heavily used in software development. Maybe even in the next 3-5 years. But even at that point there will need to be a knowledgeable human to collaborate with, verify the output, make sure it's being pieced together in a meaningful and workable way, and keep the AI's work in check.