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0 pointsAnotherGoodName9mo ago0 comments

I see this attitude a lot. The idea that people finding value from AI are mediocre programmers.

I've been staff level at Meta and Google and many other companies in my career. I've been in the industry over 20 years now. I can talk to peers in the industry at that level and above and the sentiment is pretty universal. "This saves a lot of time, we need engineers to learn to use this asap". Such decisions are not coming from a vacuum. It's literally your most senior engineers advising management that leads to these mandates.

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reseasonable9mo ago

It’s a skill just like any other. Without practice people will absolutely waste time. But knowing which problems are appropriate for an LLM can save days of labor.

As an engineer in the field for 30 years, this tech beats every man page, sdk, google search, stack overflow post or head banging situation by light years.

The rebuke of it is surprisingly antithetical to the progress of the industry. It reminds me of the decade+ of those who refused to use an IDE and favored notepad[++] or vanilla vim instead. I suspect in 5 more years those similarly-minded folks will finally adapt in the same way we’ve all grown accustomed to IDEs today. Or those who adapt will just outpace those who don’t.

happytoexplain9mo ago

The rebuking is largely focused on using AI-written code (and other content) in ignorant ways, not on using AI to learn or to get example code upon which to base your own, or for simple objective code you can confidently audit, which are in fact more reliably good and less depressing/degrading/market-damaging use cases.

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