Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

this is precisely why i refuse to use AI to generate code at all. i'd have to not only read it but internalize it and understand it in a way as if i had written it myself. at that point it is easier to actually write the code myself.

for prototypes and throwaway stuff where only the results count, it may be ok. but not for code that goes into a larger project. especially not FOSS projects where the review depends on volunteers.

Reviewing code is much less of a burden if I can trust the author to also be invested in the output and have all the context they need to make it correct. That's true for my team / tldraw's core contributors but not for external contributors or drive-by accounts. This is nothing new and has up to now been worth the hassle for the benefits of contribution: new perspectives, other motivations, relationships with new programmers. It's just the scale of the problem and the risk that the repo gets overwhelmed by "claude fix this issue that I haven't even read" PRs.

In the civic tech hacknight community I'm part of, it's hard to collaborate the same now, at least when people are using AI. Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast. It's like the pace layers have changed

It's been proposed that we start collaborating in specs, and just keep regenerating the code like it's CI, to get back to the feeling of collaboration without holding back on the energy and speed of agent coding

I actually think Ada has good potential as an AI adjacent language because the syntax is optimised for readability (I personally find it very readable too.)

This is probably true, and while I expect productivity to go up, I also expect "FOSS maintainer burnout" to skyrocket in the coming years.

Everyone knows reading code is one-hundredth as fun as writing it, and while we have to accept some amount of reading as the "eating your vegetables" part of the job, FOSS project maintainers are often in a precarious enough position as it is re: job satisfaction. I think having to dramatically increase the proportion of reading to writing, while knowing full well that a bunch of what they are reading was created by some bozo with a CC subscription and little understanding of what they were doing, will lead to a bunch of them walking away.

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