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.