AI coding agents are amazing, but lean on them too hard and your engineering skills atrophy. Aviation already lived through this. Here's what we can steal from how they fixed it.
But subject matter experts provide a clean, well optimized abstraction — the programming language — so it’s OK not to understand assembly unless you’re solving a very specialized problem.
LLMs are not experts, do not provide any consistent abstraction, and do not indicate you from the details of what they produce.
I was taught with compilers you couldn’t trust. The old buggy ones that needed babysitting still beat doing everything by hand.
Even when they worked, you were expected to know assembly for inline optimizations, and my assembly education was surely terrible compared to my teachers’. That gap was okay, because things usually worked out. The point was using the higher-level tools to get more done without sweating every last detail.
Tools can be useful well before they’re taken for granted. Art software was always a hot mess. 3D software’s still a hot mess. People nonetheless find immense utility in these programs.
This tech would be a non-issue if it didn’t actually work. Chatbots can code now, and they’re good enough that I’ve seen critics fixate on maintainability, which is about as high-level as complaints could be. The big fat datacenter versions have caused sharp divisions by reimplementing open-source projects, using completely different structure in other languages entirely. The offline laptop versions are only months behind. Shit is getting weird in this house.
But subject matter experts provide a clean, well optimized abstraction — the programming language — so it’s OK not to understand assembly unless you’re solving a very specialized problem.
LLMs are not experts, do not provide any consistent abstraction, and do not indicate you from the details of what they produce.
I was taught with compilers you couldn’t trust. The old buggy ones that needed babysitting still beat doing everything by hand.
Even when they worked, you were expected to know assembly for inline optimizations, and my assembly education was surely terrible compared to my teachers’. That gap was okay, because things usually worked out. The point was using the higher-level tools to get more done without sweating every last detail.
Interesting to hear more about that transition, thanks.
I didn’t think we’ve reached the “mostly works out” stage with AI for anything more essential than a demo.
Tools can be useful well before they’re taken for granted. Art software was always a hot mess. 3D software’s still a hot mess. People nonetheless find immense utility in these programs.
This tech would be a non-issue if it didn’t actually work. Chatbots can code now, and they’re good enough that I’ve seen critics fixate on maintainability, which is about as high-level as complaints could be. The big fat datacenter versions have caused sharp divisions by reimplementing open-source projects, using completely different structure in other languages entirely. The offline laptop versions are only months behind. Shit is getting weird in this house.