Comment by dpark

I am increasingly convinced that the AI skeptics that remain in the software industry have put very little time into experimenting with AI coding. It’s like listening to someone confidently assert that a plane could never travel faster than the speed of sound and providing evidence that seems compelling only until you have seen a supersonic jet.

As a software engineer, I prefer the scenario where AI is incompetent at writing effective software. But I don’t think that scenario describes the real world.

> AI cannot unless the algorithm was already created

We have documented cases of AI producing novel mathematical proofs. The narrative that AI can only regurgitate existing info has been pretty soundly disproven at this point. I would not consider it a good thing that your perspective is unchanging in the face of new information.

This sort of assertion is also lacking merit because most coding is not about novel algorithms. Most coding is in fact straightforward regurgitation of ideas and code a thousand other developers have already written. So even if this were all AI can possibly do, it could still be a significant improvement over manually coding the same uninteresting boilerplate and CRUD logic.

I think this is perhaps a big piece of the disconnect between your perspective and mine. When we talk about “the middle”, you focus on the bit of critical logic there while I am focusing on the vast amount of logic there that is deeply uninteresting. It’s kind of like the “premature optimization” thing. Put your mental energy where it matters.

> So when I read comments that says they don't care about code, but also have no answer about how they will solve their user's problems or how will they modify the software to future changes, it seems so strange to me. Like is your belief backed by real world experience?

This is a bizarre statement because we haven’t talked about a user’s problems. You’ve seemingly manufactured a scenario in your head where I have AI producing code for no purpose. It’s no wonder you can’t see how this makes sense, because it doesn’t.