All the above is also true (though perhaps in different proportions) of humans writing code! But here’s the big difference:

When humans write the code, those humans are •thinking• about the problem the whole time: understanding where those flaws might be hiding, playing out the implications of business assumptions, studying the problem up close.

When AI write the code, none of that happens. It’s a tradeoff: faster code generation at the cost of reduced understanding.

2/

The effect of AI is to reduce the cost of •generating code• by a factor of X at the cost of increasing the cost of •thinking about the problem• by a factor of Y.

And yes, Y>1. A thing non-developers do not understand about code is that coding a solution is a deep way of understanding a problem — and conversely, using code that’s dropped in your lap greatly increases the amount of problem that must be understood.

3/

@inthehands @RuthMalan every dev wants a greenfield project. LLMs shade even greenfield projects brown.

But then it's not the devs that are asking for this* so much as a managerial class looking for the sort of silver bullet that brings down both pay and the amount of time dealing with a type of worker they find difficult.

*not the ones who are any good, anyway

@rgarner @RuthMalan
Yup. All that.

And Brooks’s maxim that there is no silver bullet still stands undefeated.