Programmer warns: AI lets you build systems you don't understand

I answered this to myself - stop worrying about LLMs. It's pretty simple: due to Curry-Howard isomorphism, programming languages are just notations for some type of formal logic.

Now ask yourself a question, what language do you want to maintain the programs in? Do you think natural language is going to be easier and more maintainable than formal logic?

The answer is no. So you need programmers, people who can read the formal description and adapt it to new requirements.

LLMs are amazing technology, but the truth is - natural language just kinda sucks. Therefore, you don't really need them (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect ).

I think people love LLMs for the same reasons they love magicians. But just like the magician employs a hidden trick, LLM just runs some algorithm you don't see or understand.

So worrying about LLMs taking programming job is kinda like worrying that a magician will take a warehouse worker job, because they can levitate stuff. Meanwhile, we already have automated programmer - it's called a compiler.

I'm a software engineer, I do software development but also system maintenance, and I do handle networking and telephony systems, and work with some juniors. Working with AI is problematic. It can speed up you but at the same time delay you. For the system maintenance part sometimes you need to do a lot of stuff fast and in various machines and you can't just count on a cloud based AI oracle (that takes time) to do your job for you. And the same time, the more you use it as a oracle, the less competent you get. If you are an expert, I would say in any area, you do benefit from using AI as a tool but it easily can become a double edged sword and make you less proficient. For juniors, it can make them rapidly produce stuff that is impressive and works ok for sites and some visual stuff, but it's impossible for a junior to become an expert if they get stuck in the AI using loop. For AI to cause a clean impact, I would say that we would have to live in a world where software engineering didn't matter. That is, the choice of databases, high availability systems, the programming languages themselves.

“I built a thing with AI and I don’t understand it. I want to make changes and fix things and have no ability to theorize why it fails or how to fix it.”

Oh my. See, you have to be able to program it yourself before you can build it with an LLM. Otherwise you have no way of judging the output. AI isn’t going to make you a programmer.

Learning to program is.

Interesting article. My advice is to do it the old fashioned, hard way. There’s no royal road to knowledge, skill, and learning.

i might never know what it's like to learn programming after LLMs became powerful (I started programming in ~2002). But if someone forced me to give advice to such people, I'd say just start building things and stay curious.

That means, use LLMs to build whole sites and then dig in where you are curious. Look at the code, ask your LLM how it works and keep digging until you understand how the program is constructed. A benefit is that you're looking at a REAL program, not a toy example. And also, if your program stops working well (bugs or perf issues), you can debug it with the LLM and start asking it to teach you why things were slow and the concepts behind it.

I think you can basically build your own on-the-fly curriculum these days and do it with a real-world example WHILE you build cool stuff.

I think the biggest barrier will be motivation - many people don't want to be curious, and they just want it to work. they won't learn anything that way.

"The same kind of argument was used when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. And indeed, lots of new jobs were created, just not in the Western world."

China's entry into the WTO is really not a good evidentiary example for AI causing mass unemployment. Unemployment in the U.S. had already been increasing at the time, peaked soon after, decreased to well below the point it had been at China's entry, and only went up again during the Great Financial Crisis, which had nothing -- or at least very little -- to do with competition from China. That's not to say that jobs weren't lost, even en masse, but they were replaced, and U.S. unemployment has been near record lows in recent years. China's WTO entry is a supporting point, not a counterpoint, to the idea that jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new ones.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

This is an issue that's very real for me right now because I'm in the middle of teaching my own kids programming, and we've been working on it for years at this point. I'm watching AI seemingly invalidate the premise behind learning all of it. It's been a pretty depressing change to be honest, because I love programming and watching this happen is hard.

So, I've changed my approach with my own teaching. I'm having them do three things that I'm hoping will prepare them to work in the world they're going to be entering soon:

1. Always have a handmade project going, and work on it without AI assistance even if it's painfully slow.

2. When working with AI, treat it as a compiler that operates on data structures, algorithms, and architectural requirements rather than source code. You have to understand the theoretical pieces of what you're building before you instruct it to assemble them.

3. Use the AI as a powerful tool to grow your own knowledge of algorithms and troubleshooting. Whenever a problem crops up, it's an opportunity to come up with a few hypotheses of what the actual issue is. Don't let the model do it first. I have them actually write these down in our custom kanban tool as issue cards, and then they use the model to investigate how close they came to the true issue.

I'm hoping this will give them something similar to my experience of debugging over a lifetime of coding. The knowledge that seems to be most valuable that I bring to the table when coding with AI is in […]