Things are changing, learning the basics of code is important and should not be avoided, but as I said, for the times to come I think it's more important to understand how software works, and of course how to read code, than to master a language or understand low level stuff. The history of software itself shows this, we can just look at how languages evolved from low level to high level, it was always about making the process of building software easier.
Discussion
Yeah, that's fine, but if you only know as much as the AI, then the AI knows as much as you do.
I think there will soon be no professional market for people who don't understand computers. It's just gonna be real software and system engineers, designers (who will also be expected to know WTF is going on because design stuff is extremely fidgety), and vibe coders.
design stuff is next level above programming
design of algorithms usually requires understanding of advanced mathematics
design of architecture usually requires a lot of years of experience programming either learning architecture with the help of a nice language toolchain (eg go) or under a 5+ year veteran who has done the same thing or had a good lead to do the architecture stuff above them
Yeah, people think the higher-level stuff is easier, but it's harder. It only looks easier, on a superficial level.
This is already a problem. Explaining backend and architecture design choices to devs who only ever worked on a framework that wraps all kinds of internals is hard. Right now, senior devs that started before all the fancy stuff keep a lot of the teams afloat by understanding where it all came from and vetoing mad ideas.
Yeah. It's sorta weird being "the senior devs", but that's anyone over 24, at this point, since the Boomers made their great escape.
And that is still going to happen imho, experienced developers are going to be crucial, but the barrier to code have been lowered by a lot, basically now anyone can code even without any knowledge of coding or software development, so for that reason I think that for someone who wants to start in this world now is more important to have a strong foundation about architecture design, best practices and once you get the basics of how to think in software and how to structure a system go deeper in specific languages, but human written code is not a priority anymore. I really think that this year is the last year that a human will write code without assistance, I can see that trend clearly, and it's just the beginning. That can be seen as a problem, but it is the reality.
I think it's been decades, since anyone just sat down and typed in an entire program without software assistance. The IDEs are really powerful, and code -generators are not new.
New is that the people building software can't even comprehend they code created.
LLMs and LSPs are very different things imho
But that's true, for that reason I think now it's more important to understand what your code is doing and how it plays in your system than how to write it
And I'm the opinion that you can't understand it, as well, unless you've written some.
You can watch someone else ride a bike or write an essay or cook a soufflé, without ever gaining the ability.
I agree, I'm just saying that things are changing, and now it's like you can have some sort of chef next to you teaching you how to do the soufflé, I've never said that you shouldn't touch any code 🤷 anyways just opinions about what I can observe around
I’m trying to point out the issue of a potentially misleading sense of accomplishment. It’s hard to judge expertise in most circumstances and it’s harder to judge an AI. It’s possible to pick up bad patterns from it unknowingly especially as a beginner. Maybe the soufflé chef never actually made the soufflé before either and just makes it up on the spot.
But yes, writing code is already of relatively little value. And we are all guessing which of the related skills will stay relevant and how long.
Exactly this! Totally agree
They constantly hallucinate classes and functions, too. Drives me nuts. And then when I'm like, that isn't a thing, it starts arguing with me and I have to demand it rewrite and it'll rewrite three times the same crap and I have to just go in and hard-delete everything and force it to start from scratch.
People are learning to code from this crazy person who lives in my computer. 😂