Comment by epolanski
16 hours ago
Your post misses the fact that 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing and that the overwhelming majority of developers, even ivy league graduates, suck at coding and problem solving.
Thus, AI is a great productivity tool if you know how to use it for the overwhelming majority of problems out there. And it's a boost even for those that are not even good at the craft as well.
This whole narrative of "okay but it can't replace me in this or that situation" is honestly between an obvious touche (why would you think AI would replace rather than empower those who know their craft) and stale luddism.
> 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing
Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT, and it's people who believe that and act that way who produce the tangled messes of spiderweb code that are utterly opaque to public searches and AI analysis -- the supposed "1%"), if even as low as 1% of the code I interacted with was the kind of code that required really deep thought and analysis, it could easily balloon to take up as much time as the other "99%".
Oh, and Ned Ludd was right, by the way. Weavers WERE replaced by the powered loom. It is in the interest of capital to replace you if they are able to, not to complement you, and furthermore, the teeth of capital have gotten sharper over time, and its appetite more voracious.
> Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT)
Can you share what these "hard problems" are that > 1% of developers are working on?
Try using any AI tool to write a working realtime GI (global illumination) implementation. I've been working on a novel implementation for 60fps/1080p GI and everytime I use Copilot or Claude to even try fixing a minor bug/troubleshoot it nukes entire functions and rewrites them using garbled shader code, old syntax/methods.
Puts things into stark perspective for me.
PS. no amount of prompt engineering will save you in this endeavour.
Capital is also willing to have vastly lower quality and burden the remaining labor with more toil in exchange for even lower costs. Velocity will rise, quality will fall, toil will increase leading to more burnout but there will be more expendable bodies to cycle through the slop cleanup farm.
I've started to come to the conclusion that only greenfield projects consist of repetitive plumbing. Legacy software is like plumbing if all the pipes were tied into a knot. The edge cases, ambiguous naming, hacky solutions, etc. all make for a miserable experience, both for humans and AIs.