Comment by HumblyTossed
4 hours ago
You're right that a dev's job is to solve problems. However, one loses a lot of that if one doesn't think in computerese - and only reading code isn't enough. One has to write code to understand code. So for one to do one's _actual_ job, they cannot depend solely on "AI" to write all the code.
We used to say that about people who wrote in C instead of assembler. Then we used to say that (any many still do) about people who opted for "scripting languages" over "systems languages".
It's "true" in a sense. It helps. But it is also largely irrelevant for most of us, in that most of us are writing code you can learn to read and write in a tiny proportion of the time we spend in working life. The notion that you need to keep spending more than a tiny fraction of your time writing code in order to understand enough to be able to solve business problem will seem increasingly quaint.
> The notion that you need to keep spending more than a tiny fraction of your time writing code in order to understand enough to be able to solve business problem will seem increasingly quaint.
Completely disagree. Reading books doesn't make you an author. Reading books AND writing books makes you an author.
The entire point is we increasingly don't need to be authors.
Most of us aren't paid to be authors in your analogy.
(Which is good, because outside of your analogy, most authors are paid peanuts, and most of those of us who do write do so because we enjoy it, not as a job)
But even if our jobs were to be authors, while I learned some things about writing books from writing the novels I have written and published, I learned far more from being a voracious reader for decades.
I probably needed both, and I'm sure I'd improve as a writer past what I could from just reading by writing more, I think your analogy if anything is a perfect fit for my point that we don't need to spend more than a tiny proportion our time writing to be competent at it (I won't claim great).
Many of us will probably keep doing it for fun, but it will be increasingly hard to justify "manual coding" at work.