Comment by CivBase
3 days ago
I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck.
Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions.
Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have. That takes an engineer. Maybe AI will get there someday, but it certainly isn't today.
Engineers can certainly use AI to generate code when they need it... but in my experience I don't need much code to do my job, so AI coding doesn't help me much. My personal experience is that by the time I've reviewed the output and corrected the mistakes, I may as well have written it myself.
Coding is anything but cheap. You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.
Coding litterally is cheap. We outsource it for wages that you'd expect of a bottom-level fast food employee. We've been doing that for many years.
It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures. Most of you could probably code by the end of your fresan year of college. Many probably learned at least some coding before college.
I've learned plenty since those days. I can code much faster now than I used to - in the same way an accountant is probably faster at mental math than they once were. But an accountant's value isn't in how fast they can crunch numbers. In the same way, a software engineer's value isn't in how fast they can code.
> It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures.
Many employers' understanding of programming is stuck in the era of the 1970s. At that time, this was indeed what programming was about. Since that time, programming has evolved a lot to encompass much more complicated concepts.
It's a get-what-you-pay-for thing. If coding is cheap, you get a low-effort, likely low-quality product. The conclusion is that coding is not cheap, only managers and business-minded decision makers are.
> You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.
Well said.