I’m seeing this everywhere and it’s great to have it spelt out.
“The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication”
AI can dramatically speed up testing and code reviews. Generating unit tests is a major application of AI.
Code reviews can be accelerated too: “please quickly explain what this code is doing” to give you a foothold; “please check this code for any obvious mistakes” enables you to quickly bounce if a new review will be needed. And better yet - the submitter can ask the AI to do that, and also to suggest refactoring that will make code review easier and faster for someone else.
As for understand code and communicating it, well that is going to less and less necessary as the abstraction level we work at is lifted.
This objection is just cope. It’s moving the goalposts because we’re scared AI is going to take out jobs.
In truth, it will simply accelerate our work until we hit AGI. And at that point (which I think is probably a way off) we’ll have much greater concerns than the job market.
“The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication”
AI can dramatically speed up testing and code reviews. Generating unit tests is a major application of AI.
Code reviews can be accelerated too: “please quickly explain what this code is doing” to give you a foothold; “please check this code for any obvious mistakes” enables you to quickly bounce if a new review will be needed. And better yet - the submitter can ask the AI to do that, and also to suggest refactoring that will make code review easier and faster for someone else.
As for understand code and communicating it, well that is going to less and less necessary as the abstraction level we work at is lifted.
This objection is just cope. It’s moving the goalposts because we’re scared AI is going to take out jobs.
In truth, it will simply accelerate our work until we hit AGI. And at that point (which I think is probably a way off) we’ll have much greater concerns than the job market.