GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

… because programming languages are the right level of precision for specifying a program you want. Natural language isn’t it. Of course you need to review and edit what it generates. Of course it’s often easier to make the change yourself instead of describing how to make the change.

I wonder if the independent studies that show Copilot increasing the rate of errors in software have anything to do with this less bold attitude. Most people selling AI are predicting the obsolescence of human authors.

Doesn't AI have diminishing returns on it's pseudo creativity? Throw all the training output of LLM into a circle. If all input comes from other LLM output, the circle never grows. Humans constantly step outside the circle.

Perhaps LLM can be modified to step outside the circle, but as of today, it would be akin to monkeys typing.

I think you're either imagining the circle too small or overestimating how often humans step outside it. The typical programming job involves lots and lots of work, and yet none of it creating wholly original computer science. Current LLMs can customize well known UI/IO/CRUD/REST patterns with little difficulty, and these make up the vast majority of commercial software development.

Frameworks and low code systems have been able to do that for years. The reason they haven’t replaced programmers is that every system eventually becomes a special unique snowflake as long as it has time and users.

I’m getting maybe a 10-20% productivity boost using AI on mature codebases. Nice but not life changing.

a 20% boost is huge, for 3 years since chatgpt. even if it stopped there, that's 20% fewer people that need to be in your role, which is at least tens of thousands of jobs