This is the right take on the future. Unsurprising that it came from Karpathy all the way back in 2017.
The quality of the code is irrelevant, as the point of Software 2.0 is that it's another layer of abstraction on top of traditional code.
"Coding" becomes "I need something to do a thing," rather than "def doSomething: ..."
As long as the output gives you what you need, the code quality ultimately is an efficiency play. But as AI coding improves, it can refactor itself, so it's a short-term problem.
In my own experience coding with an "AI assistant," I've been able to mentally stay in "architecture mode," which makes me feel twice as creative, twice as productive. That alone is a net positive.
Perhaps he's right but it's a very depressing view of the future.
> "Coding" becomes "I need something to do a thing," rather than "def doSomething: ..."
More likely, corporate overlords will decide that you cannot just "do a thing" but rather that you are allowed to do X, Y and Z things for which they have pre-trained commercial models for.
> As long as the output gives you what you need, the code quality ultimately is an efficiency play. But as AI coding improves, it can refactor itself, so it's a short-term problem.
Have you ever debugged a problem with generated source code? Or even a compiler bug? Now imagine leaving your AI to go find the bug or iterate until the bug disappears hehehe...
> In my own experience coding with an "AI assistant," I've been able to mentally stay in "architecture mode," which makes me feel twice as creative, twice as productive. That alone is a net positive.
IMO, if your work benefits from an AI assistant then your work is to produce many lines of code and you would benefit equally from creating high-level abstractions than from using pre-trained black box models (or as some call them "new hires").
Until it needs to be maintained, or has weird bugs.
> As long as the output gives you what you need, the code quality ultimately is an efficiency play. But as AI coding improves, it can refactor itself, so it's a short-term problem.
Not sure how this is going to work on large codebases.
I think the "until it needs to be maintained" is an oft-quoted excuse that is either 1) unavoidable, no matter how elegant the code, or 2) way overstated.
The quality of the code is irrelevant, as the point of Software 2.0 is that it's another layer of abstraction on top of traditional code.
"Coding" becomes "I need something to do a thing," rather than "def doSomething: ..."
As long as the output gives you what you need, the code quality ultimately is an efficiency play. But as AI coding improves, it can refactor itself, so it's a short-term problem.
In my own experience coding with an "AI assistant," I've been able to mentally stay in "architecture mode," which makes me feel twice as creative, twice as productive. That alone is a net positive.