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.
LLMs are very much like pair programmers in my experience. For the junior engineer, they are excellent resources for learning, the way a senior engineer might be. Not only can they code what the junior can’t, they can explain questions the junior has about the code and why it’s doing what it’s doing.
For senior devs, it is a competent pair programmers, acting as an excellent resource for bouncing ideas off of, rubber ducking, writing boilerplate, and conducting code reviews.
For expert devs, it is a junior/senior dev you can offload all the trivial tasks to so you can focus on the 10% of the project that is difficult enough to require your expertise. Like a junior dev, you will need to verify what it puts together, but it’s still a huge amount of time saved.
For junior devs specifically, if they are not curious and have no interest in actually learning, they will just stop at the generated code and call it a day. That’s not an issue with the tool, it’s an issue with the dev. For competent individuals with a desire to learn and grow, LLMs represent one of the single best resources to do so. In that sense, I think that junior devs are at a greater advantage than ever before.
Hard disagreeing here. It's a difference to work on a task because you feel it brings you tangible progress or because it's an artificial exercise that you could really do with one sentence to Claude if it weren't for the constraints of the learning environment. This feeling is actually demotivating for learning.