Wow, this is just what I've been looking for without even realizing it. A lot of my friends who are newer to the world of programming are very excited by this new wave of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Conversely, I personally have a lot of misgivings about AI programming sort of half-formed in my mind. I've been programming for a while now (although I'm sure relative to all the SDF veterans I'm still pretty new to the game) and I can't bring myself to believe that prodding ChatGPT into a reasonable output is more efficient than just writing the code yourself... and then I start to worry that perhaps I'm biased. As they say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
Anyways, your headline alone is a better argument against the merits of AI programming than anything I was able to come up with, so going into it I knew the post would be a good read. And I wasn't disappointed: you've provided me with a much better framework to discuss generative AI with folks moving forward. Thanks for writing this!
Think about using AI output as inspiration, examples, getting over writers block, etc, and less about using it to cut and paste it's output wholesale as completed work.
Wow, this is just what I've been looking for without even realizing it. A lot of my friends who are newer to the world of programming are very excited by this new wave of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Conversely, I personally have a lot of misgivings about AI programming sort of half-formed in my mind. I've been programming for a while now (although I'm sure relative to all the SDF veterans I'm still pretty new to the game) and I can't bring myself to believe that prodding ChatGPT into a reasonable output is more efficient than just writing the code yourself... and then I start to worry that perhaps I'm biased. As they say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
Anyways, your headline alone is a better argument against the merits of AI programming than anything I was able to come up with, so going into it I knew the post would be a good read. And I wasn't disappointed: you've provided me with a much better framework to discuss generative AI with folks moving forward. Thanks for writing this!
Think about using AI output as inspiration, examples, getting over writers block, etc, and less about using it to cut and paste it's output wholesale as completed work.