Comment by sweezyjeezy
17 hours ago
I actually have a rather dim view of the "writing code was never the point" line. Not because it's objectively wrong, but because I see it as something we're mostly telling ourselves to feel better about the status quo. Ability to write good code has been highly celebrated (and remunerated) for decades. As it is becoming less relevant, we immediately backtrack and start lionizing the parts where we can still be useful instead. Consider the counterfactual - AI continued to be terrible at writing code, but weirdly better at humans at product decisions, architecture etc. In this universe, saying "coding was never the point" would not be popular.
It also find little solace in it aside from 'well this version of GPT isn't taking your job'. AI labs certainly have no intention for the higher level skills to stay in the human-only domain. The veteran developer with the coherent theory of a large stack is immensely valuable today. But they also don't survive if a company can drop a few coders' salaries on rewriting that stack from scratch - faster, fewer bugs, more coherent, able to react to changing business requirements with more agility etc. I am not saying this is where we are, but I think there is a reasonably good chance this is where our road is leading us.
The counterfactual does not sound appealing in the least. That's basically, AI tells human coders what to do, tells us to re-do our architecture when they don't like it, and generally removes all control and initiative from us. But we get to write a for-loop by ourselves? That's our victory?
Maybe it's just me, but imagining that counterfactual reinforces that "writing code was never the point." At least, for me, I enjoyed writing code because it allowed me to design the architecture rather than having some architect lead or engineering manager above me decide.