Comment by latexr
3 days ago
Though I do believe you are making them in good faith, I find those comparisons do not hold.
CAD still requires you know what to do, and without CAD you can still draw blueprints by hand because you know what the result should be. Checkout is basic arithmetic you can do on a paper or even your personal phone. In both cases it is clear what the process is and what the output should be, and it doesn’t replace knowledge and training and certification.
With coding, none of that is true. By and large, there is a trend of people who don’t know what they’re doing shitting out software, or people who should know better not verifying the very flawed output they get. That is already having negative consequences in people’s lives.
My father, who was a mechanical engineer, has noted an instance of "brainrot" occurring with younger engineers: they are instructed in how to design parts, but not how to machine them, so they lack physical intuition about what kind of finish and tolerance is appropriate for a given part. This isn't really the fault of the young engineers, nor is it the fault of CAD which is still mainly a more efficient, more expensive draftsman's pencil, just a consequence of the fact that engineering curricula have largely optimized away the craftsmanship aspects of actually building things, leaving mechanical design work to be a mainly theoretical exercise.
With AI-assisted development we are at risk of something similar happening; the promise of LLM-based programming assistance is the ability to very rapidly knock together something according to a high-level specification without developing the craftsman's "feel" for how it actually runs. The scope of what's passed on in the discipline is narrowing, and people are forgetting essential skills they used to rely on in order to craft quality software.