We all know the famous quote from the preface of SICP:
... we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
But now that people almost exclusively use AI "code assistants" to write the code instead of them, can we still claim that programming has any use for the thinking person? Hasn't it fully degraded into mindless drudgery?
But now that people almost exclusively use AI "code assistants" to write the code instead of them
What makes you think that?
>>2
It's not allowed at my job so I am going by what I read online.
The idea for declarative languages that generate a program from a regular formula have been around for a long time. With these new language models, taking in ambiguous and sloppily formed ideas and generating programs from them appears to be the new thing. In any case, it's up to the programmer to identify and fit the resulting program into the problem he's trying to solve.
AI isn't going to write all the software we need, it will only be capable of producing bits and pieces that make up some of the "completed" software. People cannot produce a thorough software requirements specification that will then be interpreted by an AI, and then the AI will spit out software that fits accurately to the specification. What we can do is divide the software specification into sets of algorithms and then ask the AI to write a software solution for each limited and specific algorithm.
All these "AI" code assistants are just a more elaborate form of probabilistic template system that generates code from large training data set.
Not to mention that if a new programming language, with a completely unique semantic and syntax, is to be invented in the future, and become popular, then these AI code assistants will be useless with that language, as there's no training data to infer from.
Hell, all of these AI code assistants are already pretty useless with less mainstream or niche programming languages, so the idea that programmers are exclusively using these tools to write code for them is just silly.
It's strange how "we conjure the spirits of the fomputer with our spells" has now taken the shape of sophisticated (?) algorithms influencing people's opinions and dumb AI imps vomiting elaborate nonsense in every form of communication.