I don't think it will go away, I think there will remain a niche for code where we care about precision. Maybe that niche will get smaller over time, but I think it will be a hold out for quite a while. A loose analogy I've found myself using of late is comparing it to bespoke vs off the shelf suits.
For instance, two things I'm currently working on:
- A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo for four years.
- A basic web API exposing data from a legacy database for work.
I can see how the API could be developed mostly by agents - it's a pretty cookie cutter affair and my main value in the equation is just my knowledge of the legacy database in question.
But for the game... man, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very particular when it comes to performance and the logic flow. An example: entities interacting with each other. You have to worry about stuff like the ordering of events within a frame, what assumptions each entity can make about the other's state, when and how they talk to each other given there's job based multi-threading, and a lot of performance constraints to boot (thousands of active entities at once). And that's just a small example from a much bigger iceberg.
I'm pretty confident that if I leaned into using agents on the game I'd spend more time re-explaining things to them than I do just writing the code myself.
I write systems rust on the cutting edge all day. My work is building instant MicroVM sandboxes.
I was shocked recently when it helped me diagnose a musl compile issue, fork a sys package, and rebuild large parts of it in 2 hours. Would've taken me atleast 2 weeks to do it without AI.
Don't want to reveal the specific task, but it was a far out of training data problem and it was able to help me take what would've normally taken 2 weeks down to 2 hours.
Since then I've been going pretty hard at maximizing my agent usage, and tend to have a few going at most times.
Yeah a lot of us were at the point the other guy is now and thinking that writing code by hand is still an acceptable way to go. It just isn’t anymore unless you can justify spending 5 times more time in a task just because you have some principle that code needs to be written by hand. And the funny thing is that the more complex the code base, it actually becomes the more appropriate to only touch it with AI since AI can keep a lot more concepts in its mind than us human with our poultry 7 or so. I think only a few die hard programmers will keep thinking that in a year from now.
Diagnosis is very different from writing code, though. I fully agree that it can be very helpful for analysis and search, but I don’t let it write code.
For instance, two things I'm currently working on: - A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo for four years. - A basic web API exposing data from a legacy database for work.
I can see how the API could be developed mostly by agents - it's a pretty cookie cutter affair and my main value in the equation is just my knowledge of the legacy database in question.
But for the game... man, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very particular when it comes to performance and the logic flow. An example: entities interacting with each other. You have to worry about stuff like the ordering of events within a frame, what assumptions each entity can make about the other's state, when and how they talk to each other given there's job based multi-threading, and a lot of performance constraints to boot (thousands of active entities at once). And that's just a small example from a much bigger iceberg.
I'm pretty confident that if I leaned into using agents on the game I'd spend more time re-explaining things to them than I do just writing the code myself.