I agree with this, but I’m also curious: what would have to change before that advice is as sound as “write a little bit of assembly by hand” or the even more ridiculous “just write the raw bytes for the program in a hex editor?”
Well, I'm currently applying for jobs, so being able to write code without AI is actually important.
More generally, I want analytic reasoning and problem solving skills. Assembly, C, and Python all still have me writing an understanding algorithms, while prompting (mostly) does nt. (Actually, more so with C and Python than Assembly because it abstracted away an appropriate amount of stuff, much the same as how I can do better math with pen and paper than in my head.)
It's possible that at some point it will make sense to switch to a different analytic reasoning practice regime, but for now, programming is a really relevant one for me, and one I enjoy.
Even with LLMs, we need a way to translate between the imprecise plain English description of a program and the completely-unambiguous level of code. You need the ability to see when the LLM has resolved ambiguities in the wrong direction and steer it back. If you can't speak code, that's going to be a very error-prone process.
When I can look at a prompt and predict what the code it outputs will look like to some high degree of accuracy.
I mostly don’t think that is possible though because there’s too much ambiguity in natural language. So the answer is probably when AI is close enough to AGI that I can treat it like an actual trusted senior engineer that I’m delegating to.
lolsowrong|1 day ago
lkbm|22 hours ago
More generally, I want analytic reasoning and problem solving skills. Assembly, C, and Python all still have me writing an understanding algorithms, while prompting (mostly) does nt. (Actually, more so with C and Python than Assembly because it abstracted away an appropriate amount of stuff, much the same as how I can do better math with pen and paper than in my head.)
It's possible that at some point it will make sense to switch to a different analytic reasoning practice regime, but for now, programming is a really relevant one for me, and one I enjoy.
recursive|1 day ago
bjt|1 day ago
sarchertech|1 day ago
I mostly don’t think that is possible though because there’s too much ambiguity in natural language. So the answer is probably when AI is close enough to AGI that I can treat it like an actual trusted senior engineer that I’m delegating to.