I suspect the root of the disagreement is more about what kinds of work people do. There are many different kinds of programming and you can’t lump them all together. We shouldn’t expect an AI tool to be a good fit for all of them, any more than we should expect Ruby to be a good fit for embedded development or C to be a good fit for web apps.
My experience with low level systems programming is that it’s like working with a developer who is tremendously enthusiastic but has little skill and little understanding of what they do or don’t understand. Time I would have spent writing code is replaced by time spent picking through code that looks superficially good but is often missing key concepts. That may count as “thinking” but I wouldn’t categorize it as the good kind.
Where it excels for me is as a superpowered search (asking it to find places where we play a particular bit-packing game with a particular type of pointer works great and saves a lot of time) and for writing one-off helper scripts. I haven’t found it useful for writing code I’m going to ship, but for stuff that won’t ship it can be a big help.
It’s kind of like an excavator. If you need to move a bunch of dirt from A to B then it’s great. If you need to move a small amount of dirt around buried power lines and water mains, it’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth.
I think this is one of the most cogent takes on the topic that I've seen. Thanks for the good read!
It's also been my experience that AI will speed up the easy / menial stuff. But that's just not the stuff that takes up most of my time in the first place.
My experience with low level systems programming is that it’s like working with a developer who is tremendously enthusiastic but has little skill and little understanding of what they do or don’t understand. Time I would have spent writing code is replaced by time spent picking through code that looks superficially good but is often missing key concepts. That may count as “thinking” but I wouldn’t categorize it as the good kind.
Where it excels for me is as a superpowered search (asking it to find places where we play a particular bit-packing game with a particular type of pointer works great and saves a lot of time) and for writing one-off helper scripts. I haven’t found it useful for writing code I’m going to ship, but for stuff that won’t ship it can be a big help.
It’s kind of like an excavator. If you need to move a bunch of dirt from A to B then it’s great. If you need to move a small amount of dirt around buried power lines and water mains, it’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth.