> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.
> Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic.
But do you know what another part of being a senior developer is? Not just making them more productive, but also guiding the junior developers into becoming better, independent, self-tasking, senior coders. And that feedback loop doesn't exist here.
We're robbing ourselves of good future developers, because we aren't even thinking about the fact that the junior devs are actively learning from the small tasks we give them.
Will AI completely replace devs before we all retire? Maybe. Maybe not.
But long before that, the future coders who aren't being hired and trained because a senior dev doesn't understand that the junior devs become senior devs (and that's an important pipeline) and would rather pay $20/month for an LLM, are going to become a major loss/ brain drain domestically.
I had a rather depressing experience this semester in my office hours with two students who had painted themselves in a corner with code that was clearly generated. They came to me for help, but were incapable of explaining why they had written what was on their screens. I decided to find where they had lost the thread of the class and discovered that they were essentially unable to write a helloworld program. In other words, they lost the thread on day one. Up until this point, both students had nearly perfect homework grades while failing every in-class quiz.
From one perspective I understand the business case for pushing these technologies. But from another perspective, the long term health of the profession, it’s pretty shortsighted. Who knows, in the end maybe this will kill off the group of students who enroll in CS courses “because mom and dad think it’s a good job,” and maybe that will leave me with the group that really wants to be there. In the meantime, I will remind students that there is a difference between programming and computer science and that you really need a strong grasp of the latter to be an effective coder. Especially if you use AI tools.
I see this so much. “Data science major” became the 2020s version of law school. It’s such a double edged sword. It’s led to a huge increase in enrollment and the creation of multiple professional masters programs, so the college loves us. We hire every year and there’s always money for just about anything. On the other hand, class sizes are huge, which is not fun, and worse a large fraction of the students appear to have minimal intrinsic interest in coding or analyzing data. They’re there because it’s where the jobs are. I totally get that, in some sense college has always been that way, but it does make me look back fondly on the days when classes were 1/4 as big and filled with people who were genuinely interested in the subject.
Unfortunately I think I may get my wish. AI is going to eliminate a lot of those jobs and so the future of our field looks a bit bleak. Worse, it’s the very students who are going to become redundant the quickest that are the least willing to learn. I’d be happy to teach them basic analysis and coding skills, but they are dead set on punching everything into ChatGPT.