Comment by johnfn
1 day ago
But surely at some point you need to stop, right? Most web developers are perfectly capable without understanding the intricacies of the file system or OS, even though the browser sits on top them. Most engineers don’t know assembly, or transistors or electrical engineering. Steve Jobs didn’t know every line of Objective-C that went into OSX. I don’t think Michelangelo collected all his paint materials by hand when painting the Sistine Chapel. In some sense I don’t understand a lot of the panic around AI when the entire career progression of what it means to be a software engineer has simply been to deal with ever-increasing levels of abstraction.
> Most web developers are perfectly capable without understanding the intricacies of the file system or OS, even though the browser sits on top them.
This will mess you up if you ever need to store a significant amount of files on the file system directly, or even deal with resource usage for batch processes, or have to dig into non-trivial transaction handling when dealing with DBs without having learnt enough about them, or even the whole domain of SQL and query optimization that ORMs will not protect you from and so many other things.
I don't think you need to know everything, but you definitely need to learn.
> But surely at some point you need to stop, right?
I guess, but typically due to your own lack of curiosity or mental exhaustion, or even limited time to spend on something, rather than the new knowledge and skills not being good to have. At least knowing when AI is heading in the wrong direction for any given domain will save your bacon.
The issue is reliability. I don't need to know the implementation of the database or the lower levels of the network tasks because I trust that they works well. A bug that affects me has a very low chance of occurring and the main risk is me not reading or understanding the docs.
With AI generated systems, no one knows what's going on. Not even the AI. When an issue pops up (which has a very good chance to happen because of the complexity of integrations), debugging it can be like reverse engineering obfuscated assembly code.