Coding with AI

I don't know that there's a fundamental difference between describing a program to an LLM, which then writes the program, and writing the program yourself in a traditional programming language. In both cases, you tell a computer what to do, and the computer does it.

In any case, the point of programming languages is to make it easier to communicate with computers. What could be easier than communicating in plain English? So programming with AI feels like the natural next step.

Building with AI is disatisfying

Writing code by hand is satisfying, I think because it gives me the sense of accomplishment that comes after doing something hard. Having a bot write the code for me removes that sense of accomplishment, even if whatever it wrote was my idea.

Building with AI is also disatisfying because it changes the question a programmer has to answer from How do I solve this puzzle? to How do I get this stupid robot to understand what I'm saying? The latter is much less interesting.

But the shift seems inevtiable. The better AI gets, the less necessary (and practical) coding "by hand" will be. The programmer's role will change, insofar as they won't be a programmer at all. They'll be an AI Supervisor. Their job will be to tell the AI what to do, and then check its work.

I assume AI Supervisors will be forest people. They won't have much use for the trees, as long as the forest looks the way it's supposed to.

Possible Upsides

If you spend all your time trying to explain yourself to a dumb robot, is it possible that you'll actually get pretty good at explaining yourself? In other words, could building things with AI improve your articulation and how-to-solve-problems skills?