<story><title>AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>First of all chat GPT is great.&lt;p&gt;It is all the magic of early google, and stack overflow... Not as many ads less bullshit.&lt;p&gt;I have been coding for 25 years. Chat GPT + willing sr engineer means 2  less jr. dev&amp;#x27;s. I lived through the dot com bust, and now I can do a heroic amount of work with less effort.&lt;p&gt;This raises two points:&lt;p&gt;1. It&amp;#x27;s clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core.&lt;p&gt;2. We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer. This is great for companies in the near term (this looming down cycle), but bad for the industry as a whole long term (we dont have a pool of strong jr. engineers).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CharlieDigital</author><text>In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the new staff starts from cooking rice perfectly first and perfecting roasted seaweed before moving on to preparing an egg sushi and then graduating to fish.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not grunt work.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s how new engineers learn the ropes and gain experience doing low risk work; it&amp;#x27;s part of the learning process that only feels like grunt work to a senior dev.</text></comment>
<story><title>AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>First of all chat GPT is great.&lt;p&gt;It is all the magic of early google, and stack overflow... Not as many ads less bullshit.&lt;p&gt;I have been coding for 25 years. Chat GPT + willing sr engineer means 2  less jr. dev&amp;#x27;s. I lived through the dot com bust, and now I can do a heroic amount of work with less effort.&lt;p&gt;This raises two points:&lt;p&gt;1. It&amp;#x27;s clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core.&lt;p&gt;2. We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer. This is great for companies in the near term (this looming down cycle), but bad for the industry as a whole long term (we dont have a pool of strong jr. engineers).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s clear that we have too much grunt work&lt;p&gt;Yes, architecture, medicine and metallurgy have been improved for millenniums. Next to that, IT is a baby that can barely walk. Of course we have too much grunt work.&lt;p&gt;But also because every time we remove grunt work, the customer expectation increase, the market adapts, and now you have to use new tools that are productive enough to do what the users want with the resource they are willing to pay.&lt;p&gt;So you don&amp;#x27;t have to hand write assembly but you do have to have an app that works on 16 screens ratios. You have amazing databases ready to handle your data, but you should update the UI live.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer.&lt;p&gt;Like in most industries, we are starting to move from &amp;quot;everyone needs to be an experts&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;90% of the daily tasks really just need good technicians&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s fine. That&amp;#x27;s how it is supposed to be.&lt;p&gt;At some point only experts could duplicate your house keys. Now you have convenience key stores everywhere.&lt;p&gt;We are on the right track.&lt;p&gt;Next stop, the equivalent of residential building codes, but for public facing apps.&lt;p&gt;Because IT is so new and can be done in your garage, we thought it was special. It was not.</text></comment>