Comment by notnullorvoid 21 hours ago
Is it a skill worth learning though? How much does the output quality improve? How transferable is it across models and tools of today, and of the future?
From what I see of AI programming tools today, I highly doubt the skills developed are going to transfer to tools we'll see even a year from now.
If I had a green field project that was low novelty I would happily use AI to get a prototype out the door quickly. I basically never work on those kinds of projects though, and I've seen AI tools royal screw up enough times given clear direction on both novel and trivial tasks in existing code bases.
Detailed specs are certainly a transferable skill, what isn't is the tedious hand holding and defensive prompting. In my entire career I've worked with a lot of people, only one required as much hand holding as AI. That person was using AI to do all their work.
Perhaps... Even if I'm being optimistic though there is a ceiling for just how much productivity can be gained. Natural language is much more lossy compared to programming languages, so you'll still need a lot of natural language input to get the desired output.
Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.
> a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks.
Thank you!
With such tedious tasks does it not take you just as long to verify it didn't screw up than if you had done it yourself?
Given I see people insisting these tools don't work for them at all, and some of my results recently include spitting out a 1k line API client with about 5 brief paragraphs of prompts, and designing a website (the lot, including CSS, HTML, copy, database access) and populating the directory on it with entries, I'd think the output quality improves a very great deal.
From what I see of the tools, I think the skills developed largely consists of skills you need to develop as you get more senior anyway, namely writing detail-oriented specs and understanding how to chunk tasks. Those skills aren't going to stop having value.