> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.
The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding.
A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most important to that is the extremely hard to convey "mental model" of how the code works and an expertise of the domain it works in. Code is a derived asset of this mental model. And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project.
There are other consequences of not building this mental model of a piece of software. Reasoning at the level of syntax is proving to have limits that LLM-based coding agents are having trouble scaling beyond.
The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding.
A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most important to that is the extremely hard to convey "mental model" of how the code works and an expertise of the domain it works in. Code is a derived asset of this mental model. And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project.
There are other consequences of not building this mental model of a piece of software. Reasoning at the level of syntax is proving to have limits that LLM-based coding agents are having trouble scaling beyond.