Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked!
I expect the developers to remain employed but have even more work reviewing piles of ai code - then getting blamed when something goes wrong. Maybe AI reviewers will help.
I think there is a real need for testing frameworks to catch up.. once they can autotest and correct.. we just need to train ai to ask all the endless questions to the vague specs and requests.. what happens next is a mystery.
The problem I have with ai generated code is that there was no human who put in the detailed effort to write it. And so if it breaks, who do you ask? What you might end up doing is simply adding more ai generated code. And soon you have a codebase that no human understands.
From A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (and https://akkartik.name/post/deepness)
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked!
Programmer Archeologists was his idea.
I expect the developers to remain employed but have even more work reviewing piles of ai code - then getting blamed when something goes wrong. Maybe AI reviewers will help.
I think there is a real need for testing frameworks to catch up.. once they can autotest and correct.. we just need to train ai to ask all the endless questions to the vague specs and requests.. what happens next is a mystery.
The problem I have with ai generated code is that there was no human who put in the detailed effort to write it. And so if it breaks, who do you ask? What you might end up doing is simply adding more ai generated code. And soon you have a codebase that no human understands.
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