alt Hacker NewsWith AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.
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> With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code.
Writing, definitely. Reading, maybe. Thinking is another thing. I can think about code in a lot of ways just by reading a description of the code, or knowing how I directed the code to be written, etc. I think people are thinking about the code differently.
That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.
I’m genuinely curious why it matters to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function.
Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?
code didn't matter even before LLMs. we only ever cared about the product of it.
the current pace of LLM advancement only has to keep for five more years for handmade code to be considered a liability. I wouldn't worry about being able to recall obscure APIs or whiteboard leetcode. I'm far more worried about having to change careers at 40.