3 articles
Nate Meyvis takes up a question AI skeptics keep raising: if AI-assisted coding is so powerful, where is the wave of new, good software? Several of his answers hold up well, particularly that approval chains don’t speed up and that much new software is private. What he doesn’t address is the question itself.
A recent discussion on how AI was used effectively made me wonder what "effective" or "better" meant, because there's no way to test the alternative any more to compare. I still don't know how to characterize my own results, but I think it makes me better because it gives me a chance to work out who I am and what I mean to say, but not really how to say it.
Reader Hideki Idoru argues that AI is a decent information distiller and a bad tool for nearly everything else in software, because no one can cheaply verify that generated code is correct. The deeper claim is that most programming was already trivial, unabstracted busywork, and AI has only torn the mask off. It's worth reading and thinking about.