If you do have that skill to communicate clearly and describe the requirements of a novel problem, why is the AI still useful? Actually writing the code should be relatively trivial from there. If it isn't, that points to a problem with your tools/architecture/etc. Programmers IMX are, on average, far too tolerant of boilerplate.
For you, maybe. This statement assumes years of grueling training to become bilingual in a foreign programming language. And I can't type at 1000 tokens/s personally - sometimes I just want to press the voice dictate key and blab for five seconds and move on to something actually interesting.
...So, less experienced programmers are supposed to be happy that they can save time with the same technology that will convince their employers that a human isn't necessary for the position?
(And, frankly, I've overall quite enjoyed the many years I've put into the craft.)
I only took exception to the original statement - that coding is trivial, and the questioning if AI is even useful. So many people are finally able to create things they were never able to. That's something to celebrate. Coding isn't trivial to most people, it's more of an insurmountable barrier to entry. English works - that's why a clear-minded project manager can delegate programming to someone fluent in it, without knowing how to code themselves. We don't end up with them dumping a jar of jam on the floor, because intelligent beings can communicate in the context of a lot of prior knowledge they were trained on. That's how AI is overcoming the peanut butter and jelly problem of English. It doesn't need solutions defined for it, a word to the wise is sufficient.
This is key. It works because of previous work. People have shared context because they develop it over time, when we are raised - shared context is passed on the the new generation and it grows.
LLMs consume the context recorded in the training data, but they don't give it back. They diminish it because people don't need to learn the shared context when using this tools. It appears to work in some use cases, but it will degrade our collective shared context over time as people engage with and use these tools that consume past shared context and at the same time atrophy our ability to maintain and increase the shared context. Because the shared context is reproduced and grows when it is learned by people. If a tool just takes it and precludes people learning it, there is a delayed effect where over time there will be less shared context and when the performance of the tool degrades the ability to maintain and extend the shared context will also have degraded. We might get to an irrecoverable state and spiral.
In the last year I’ve built scripts and even full fledged apps with GUIs to solve a number of problems and automate a bunch of routine tasks at work and in my hobbies. It feels like I woke up with a superpower.
And I’ve learned a ton too, about how the plumbing works, but I still can’t write code on my own. That makes me useful but dependent on the AI.
Only if your problem is already uploaded on Github.