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.

  > Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms.

Reminds me of a misinterpretation of Knuth.

  > Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

He was definitely knocking engineers for wanting to write "perfect" algorithms, but this quote also got bastardized to mean something different from what he said (happens to many clichés). All he said was "grab a fucking profiler before you optimize."

But now, I'm not sure a lot of programmers even know what a profiler is. When was the last time you saw someone profile their code?

Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death.

I WISH we could talk about optimization. I WISH our problem was perfectionism. But right now our problem is that everything is a steaming pile of garbage and most people are just shrugging their arms like "it is the way it is". Just because you don't clean up that steaming pile of garbage doesn't mean someone else doesn't. So stop passing the buck.

I invite your attention to the StatsD telemetry protocol, where:

1. Every single measurement in a timeseries is encoded as a utf-8 string having (roughly) the following format:

  "${name}:${value}|${type}|${tags}"

where name is like "my.long.namespace.and.metric.name", value is a string formatted number, god only knows what type is, and tags is some gigantic comma separated key:value monstrosity.

2. Each and every one of these things is fired off into the ether in the form of a UDP datagram.

3. Whenever the server receives these presumably it gets around sometime to assigning them timestamps and inserts them into a database, not necessarily in that or any other particular order.

"it is the way it is[1]."

[1] https://github.com/statsd/statsd?tab=readme-ov-file#usage