Chat with a senior dev who's been coding since the 80s changed my view on AI tools

I was pair programming with Mark, a guy who wrote his first program on a punch card, and he said AI is just another autocorrect on steroids. He pointed out that coders in his day copied snippets from books and modified them, same as I copy from Copilot now. Anyone else have an old school coder shake up how you see AI in your workflow?

3 comments

3 Comments

price.ray6d ago

Isn't it kind of the same thing though? You still have to know enough to modify what the AI gives you or even spot when it's wrong. People used to copy code from books without fully getting it either, they just got better at faking it until it stuck.

the_anthony6d ago

Yeah but @phoenix573 has a point about the scale thing. Copying a bubble sort from a book means you at least had to type each line and see how it connected. With AI you can generate a whole microservice and not really know how the pieces fit together until something breaks. When you're debugging AI code are you actually learning the fix or just going back to the AI for another solution?

phoenix5736d ago

Oh man, I gotta push back on that. I mean, copying from a book and having an AI generate code for you on the fly is totally different in terms of scale and the thinking you skip. You can't accidentally paste a whole function from a book and have it mostly work, but Copilot will give you a block of code that runs even if you don't really get the logic behind it. Idk, feels like the old way forced you to understand the code on a deeper level, even when you were just borrowing it.