Traceloop reposted this
AWS CEO said that most developers could stop coding as soon as AI takes over. I disagree, and here’s why. Sure, there’s a tremendous leap in how AI is helping engineers write code. I’ve been using GitHub co-pilot for more than a year (and recently switched to Cursor), and it’s been incredible. I’m able to write full features in Go, even though I’m not super fluent in that language (I’m more of a Java & Typescript kind of engineer), and I feel that larger and larger chunks of the code I write are being generated by AI. And apparently - I’m not the only one. GitHub CEO recently said in a talk I attended that according to internal research more than 40% of the code committed to git was written by AI. This will probably continue to grow as the models get better. But, writing code is only a small part of an engineer’s job. When I build features, I feel that I spend less than 20% of my time actually coding within my IDE. Most of the time, I’m either collaborating with the rest of the team to understand how the piece I’m writing will interact with the rest of the system; debugging production issues; discussing the engineering vision of the team; researching technologies. So using AI doesn’t leave me out of things to do - it just allows me to allocate more time on these 80% tasks. The ability to do these tasks come from years of experience actually writing code. Which gets to my last point - the main issue I see with the rise of these co-pilots is the increasing gap between junior and senior developers. If you’re just out of the university, and start coding, you no longer need to understand how programming languages work. You just write a prompt and get a complete workable solution. You probably have minimal knowledge of why this works. But, you’re missing out on understanding how to actually code. And thus you’re missing what will help you become a senior software engineer, being able to tackle all the 80% stuff that I mentioned above. So no, I don’t think AI will make engineers redundant. If junior engineers rely too much on AI, avoiding getting their hands dirty and understanding the code they're writing - they'll surely become redundant. Or maybe they already are. How much of your day-to-day can be automated? Are you worried about AI taking over your work?