zerop parent
I fear that in the goal of going to "manual coding" to "fully automated coding", we might end up in the middle, where we are "semi manual coding" assisted by AI which needs different software engineer skill.
Manual coding is what code monkeys do.
I do many other things as a software engineer and writing code was always small part of it but time consuming.
Second most time consuming thing are meetings and explaining things to non technical people something like: "No Jerry we cannot just transfer 100GB of data to WebApp in each user browser for faster searching while also having it 'real time' updated".
Probably right. Feedback loops are interesting. An anecdote: I spent my career learning how to do things well... so that I could eventually be promoted to try to do it by proxy. Infinitely more difficult, garners no interest. Now we're all disappointed.
I'm not learning, just forgetting. Entirely different skills - exercise is important.
Yeah that's what I had in mind from the very beginning.
In fact I built a tool [1] that applies this principle for semi automated coding. It uses LLMs for generating code, but leave the context selection and code editing for human to complete.
I find this a sweet spot between productivity and quality of output.
I like how you put the context and prompts into the foreground. In so many tools, it’s invisible. We all know that context and prompts are there - the operation of LLMs is well known. Yet tools try and hide this and pretend that they are magic, instead of exposing control points and handles for the developer to use.
We have always been there since compilers were invented. AI is just another (rather big) iteration. Previous steps included API documentation tools, syntax highlighting, checking and formatting tools, refactoring tools, linters, and of course Stackoverflow :)
Yeah, a bit like the many frameworks that were supposed to make development trivial in X, many of which ended up being quite useful, but remained _additional_ skills to master in an ever-growing list of things we need to know to be able to do our jobs.