Comment by pbohun
9 hours ago
If all you care about is the end product and not how it's made, then you never become a better person. Your capacity for thinking and solving problems will never grow. You will never be an expert. Experts care about the process.
Of course, you may not care, and that's fine. It's important that people not be delusional about this though. A person with no medical knowledge and an AI will never be as good as someone with prodigious medical knowledge and an AI. The same is true for any profession, whether programming, music, writing, etc.
Of course. But I have been programming for over 30 years and I know that I cannot be an expert for everything. Besides that, maybe my capacity for thinking won’t grow anymore. But my capacity for solving problems just exploded in the last few years thanks to AI.
But you didn’t solve anything. AI solved it.
If you go to a coffee shop and ask extra ice, less sugar, more vanilla - did you make the coffee or the barista make the coffe and you just gave some requests to him. Using an LLM is far more similar to ordering coffee from a barista than it is to actually making the coffee. Of course the barista didn’t make the seeds, the milk etc. This is not an exact lawyerly statement.
But intuitively, you didn’t make anything when Claude Code writes all your code.
If an expert barista goes to a coffee shop and orders a coffee, do they get a better quality coffee?
Because it's a common experience of folks using LLMs to code (and other activities) that experts get better results than non-experts.
So it definitely suggests that the human is part of the making process, not just the recipient of the finished product as in your coffee example.
Why do you think using AI to write code is like ordering a coffee? They don't seem very similar to me so I'm curious how you see them as similar.