Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI?
The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implications, knowing what approaches are likely to cause problems, recognizing patterns that can be refactored, knowing where likely problems lie and how to test them, holding a complex codebase in memory and knowing where to find things -- currently come from long experience writing code.
But a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from?
I think of this because of my job as a professor; many of the homework assignments we use to develop thinking skills are now obsolete because LLMs can do them, permitting the students to pass without thinking. Perhaps there is another way to develop the skills, but I don't know what it is, and in the mean time I'm not sure how novices will learn to become experts.
I find these tools incredibly useful. But I constantly edit their output and frequently ask for changes to other peoples' code during review, some of which is AI generated.
But all of that editing and reviewing is informed by decades of writing code without these tools, and I don't know how I would have gotten the reps in without all that experience.
So I find myself bullish on this for myself and the experienced people I work with, but worried about training the next generation.