Are you using AI?

I've been using AI for a few month now, mainly tinkering with lots of caution, carefully reviewing what commands it runs, what files it touches to be sure it does what I tell it, and nothing more. I've been in "programming" for more than 30 years and I have quite an opinion on what is acceptable and what is not, hence the careful approach.

But it appears I'm quite an exception here as we've had a two day workshop at work to help us reach the 20x speed gains purported by many advocates in the field. The consultant doing all the talking was adamant that my approach is no more: "craftsmanship is dead" was his motto, parading amongst our desks.

Apparently, the "human in the loop" is just there to act a a shepherd to a flock of agents, that are writing both the code and the tests that verify it directly from the ticketing system or the written specifications. And the warden is just there to proofread everything at the end, getting the hang of the code in minutes, just like we've been doing code review for human created content.

But with the amount of code generated it's very strenuous to achieve this, there is a very heavy cognitive load. And for me, it's worse, I love writing the code, trying various options, so that I am really confident the code I wrote is the best possible approach, after having justified rejecting the others. Doing code review has always been a pain point, even if it has its undeniable use, human interaction is quite fruitful.

Sadly, this AI usage means I'm left with doing only the thing I do not like: managing "other minds" and "reviewing" their work, when they have the attention span and propensity to lie of bored teenagers: if you give strict rules to match your desire for clean code, it either loops indefinitely or straight up ignores them!

It's not all dark in there, though, because the LLMs are quite formidable at finding correlations (not causation) in lots of data, finding patterns that I would have had a hard time identifying. So for initial exploration of an issue, providing suggestions, it's quite great.

What's bothering me most, is that it's all built on a giant theft. I mean, I kinda of regret taking part in so many open source projects where the premise was to share the knowledge with fellow humans, which the license I released it under was quite clear, but now we must pay to get back the knowledge we gave for free over the years!
Or even worse, I gave for free the basis for destroying my own employment. For those versed in history, the revolt of Canuts in Lyon or Luddites in the UK should ring a bell, with, I fear, the same sad outcome.

And all this is even ignoring the economical and environmental sustainability part. We are collectively getting hooked up on a "drug" that is (almost) free today as a "tryout product", but when the dealers will start to recoup their costs, I'm worried many won't be able to afford it anymore with unforeseen circumstances.

In the end, I'm starting to seriously look at what I like doing which would be valuable to others to pay me decent money for it, and that would be quite safe from this AI monster lurking in the shadows. Maybe I should ask a LLM, after all these are just gain function optimization platforms, so it should have ideas for me to solve this equation and escape its grab...

I wanted a new kind of like for your post. I don't like what you have described at all, but very much agree with you.

We seem to have gone in a circle  - I was brought upon the notion that you can't test quality into a design (software or hardware) but via the route of  test driven development and AI we seem to being pushed into a regime where the vast team of AI monkeys bash out rubbish code and squeeze it through a sieve of tests. While we stand by and hope it'll work.

Not for me - I like to know what every line in my code does - even if it takes me longer to write. (But I'm not sure that it does - because the AI costs so much in chips and energy etc that once you factor that in - is it really any more productive ?)

MK

I wanted a new kind of like for your post. I don't like what you have described at all, but very much agree with you.

We seem to have gone in a circle  - I was brought upon the notion that you can't test quality into a design (software or hardware) but via the route of  test driven development and AI we seem to being pushed into a regime where the vast team of AI monkeys bash out rubbish code and squeeze it through a sieve of tests. While we stand by and hope it'll work.

Not for me - I like to know what every line in my code does - even if it takes me longer to write. (But I'm not sure that it does - because the AI costs so much in chips and energy etc that once you factor that in - is it really any more productive ?)

MK

Coding forces us to balance readability against efficiency. Take passwords as an analogy. If I used a random string like "Q17u1}?3f'#P" as my password, it might look highly secure to some because of it's randomness, but a much longer plain-text sentence like "Hey!I'm_using-this_really-long_password+because_I_can" can actually be harder for a computer to crack due to its sheer length.

The lesson for coding is that human-friendly structure matters, not for security or sheer efficiency of performance or for the compiler, but because we need it to understand the logic and ascertain whether it will achieve the desired outcome or not.

As an AI agent reminded me this morning, modern compilers don't care where or how a variable is declared; clean code is entirely for the human architect.