Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually

I think the whole AI vs non. AI debate is a bit besides the point. Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms.

I think the image you post at the beginning basically sums it up for me: ChatGPT o3/5 Thinking can one-shot 75% of most reasonably sized tasks I give it without breaking a sweat, but struggles with tweaks to get it to 100%. So I make those tweaks myself and I have cut my code writing task in half or one third of the time.

ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way.

Ferrari's are still hand assembled but Ford's assembly line and machines help save up human labor even if the quality of a mass-produced item is less than a hand-crafted one. But if everything was hand-crafted, we would have no computers at all to program.

Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is.

This comment captures it.

AI can do 80% of the work. I can review it later. And I spend much less time reviewing than I would have typing up everything manually.

I recently used it to add some logging and exception handling. It had to be done in multiple places.

A simple 2 line prompt one shotted it. Why do I need to waste time writing boring code?

Are you still going to have the skills to review it a year from now? Or 5 years from now when you’ve become accustomed to only writing <20% of the code? I’m already witnessing my coworkers skills degrading because of this, and it’s only going to get worse. Programming is a language, and when you don’t use it, it fades.

What will happen is that we as developers will move one layer up in the abstraction. In the future it would seem a bit nonsensical to focus on individual lines of code and syntax because AI can more or less deal with it.

We will be focusing more higher level design - which database, where the data flows, which service is used where and so on. So you will just need different skills. Coding as a skill won't be that important.

Anyone old enough to remember when UML promised the same thing? Never have to touch code again -- just draw boxes, charts, activity diagrams, etc. and right-click and generate code! Rational Rose is the future of programming!

It always turns out that when you have to make a computer execute a very precise set of operations, the absolute best way to communicate this is not English, not diagrams, but code.

It also turns out that the challenge is generally not writing that code, but figuring out that precise set of operations in the first place.

You still communicate in code and fix the errors.

> You still communicate in code and fix the errors.

But you just said

> Coding as a skill won't be that important.

So coding is only important if you need to make your software actually work, I guess?