used to have a habit of thinking in code. it'd be like walking down the street and immediately seeing what kind of code would make the next paragra...
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Exactly, Daniel! I'm currently reading a book written about 20 years ago, and the author predicted surprisingly well what modern AI would look like.
Sometimes the AI suggests to the main character, who is a programmer, that it could just write something for him. And he replies that he'll do it himself because he doesn't want to get out of practice.
Maybe we should do that from time to time too. Because I have to admit, I'm already starting to think in prompts.
sylwia, that's the piece i left out. choosing to do it yourself on purpose instead of letting the skill drift away by default...
This:
"choosing to do it yourself on purpose instead of letting the skill drift away by default"
... resonates big time - I've been banging that drum almost too often when commenting here on dev.to ...
If all we do is prompt without knowing any of the underlying 'craft', aren't we then becoming extremely dependent, and vulnerable? Like 'prompt monkeys' with big primate brains, but using very little of it ...
P.S. on the other hand, there are people who say this is just about replacing one kind of skill with another kind of skill - we also don't program in assembly language anymore, something like that ... this sounds plausible, but somehow I'm not fully convinced :-)
The assembly comparison breaks for me on one point. nobody writing c had to double-check the compiler's output line by line to trust it. i still read every diff an agent hands me. that's the real test for whether this is a clean abstraction or just dependency… does the layer above still need to verify the layer below? right now, for me, yes, every time.
"prompt monkeys with big primate brains, using very little of it" — that's uncomfortably close to how it feels some days.
@leob @dannwaneri but the truth is, it's always been the case that the better you understand what's happening at a lower level in a language, the better programmer you become. And somehow I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
As long as that does not change, we'll still have a job, lol ...
But when(ever) AI moves "up the foodchain", and enables 'business users' to vibe-code increasingly more complex and more mission critical systems (with sufficient mitigation of performance and security risks), well, then we MIGHT just get squeezed into progressively smaller "niches" as devs ...
I'm not a doomsayer, but fact is that the mid/long term future is surrounded with a lot of insecurity ...
P.S. and oh the irony - according to a newspaper article, as a result of the AI data center boom, there seems to be a huge demand for ... electricians and carpenters!
If I'd be out of (or at the end of) secondary education and had to choose a career/education path, well, I don't know - I'd think twice about development, I might be tempted to cast a wider net - development is cool, I've always loved it, but "there is more", without a doubt ...
But still - if you have a choice, do something you love, not just something that pays the bills ;-)
The skill that softens first is reading your own diffs, not typing syntax. Prompts skip the loop that trained that
andrew, reading the diff is the rep. skip enough reps and the muscle doesn't know it's supposed to fire.
Yeah interesting take! Of course it doesn't have to be either/or, it can be both, but this might be a "slippery slope" ...