Knowing what your software does is such a hard problem. Most developers have an idea but if you ask,
how are you sure?, the answers reveal how little they
know.
Most often we’re satisfied with signals and indicators that it works and we build theories and mental models that use to try to avoid the effort of proving anything.
Worse is what happens when you start using LLM models to generate the code for you. I find you start losing the mental model short-cuts; you start to trick yourself into understanding the code. You understand little.
And what few studies there are of code review suggest that we have very little impact on code quality after reading more than a couple hundred lines of code over an hour.
So the current mental leap is, “the AI is a better programmer than I am.”
I think it’s still worth becoming a better programmer regardless. And there’s no royal road. You just have to write code and struggle with writing bad code.
Most often we’re satisfied with signals and indicators that it works and we build theories and mental models that use to try to avoid the effort of proving anything.
Worse is what happens when you start using LLM models to generate the code for you. I find you start losing the mental model short-cuts; you start to trick yourself into understanding the code. You understand little.
And what few studies there are of code review suggest that we have very little impact on code quality after reading more than a couple hundred lines of code over an hour.
So the current mental leap is, “the AI is a better programmer than I am.”
I think it’s still worth becoming a better programmer regardless. And there’s no royal road. You just have to write code and struggle with writing bad code.