A Generation Of Illiterate Programmers: AI Over Dependency
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- Are software developers having an over-reliance on their AI tools? Or what about how AI is affecting their ability to learn how to become a good developer?
Are we... doomed? I don't think so, but let's dive into it.
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Here's the original article:
nmn.gl/blog/ai...
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I've been a professional developer since mid 90's on so many platforms and languages from mainframes to mobile phones. So far I've used AI only few times as an experiment, but mostly to understand what a piece of code written by somebody else does, not to produce new code.
AI seems to be mostly useful as a learning tool for common frameworks and basic coding. For the most part it's like a 4WD car or sailing with GPS. It's easier to explore outside the usual road but when there is a problem you're cooked.
Do you use/rely on any tools outside of gen AI to make you develop faster or with less cognitive stress/excertion?
@CaliJumper I would not survive without modern IDE's and their navigation and type autocomplete. Ditched Emacs and Vim 15 years ago and never looked back.
@MrMulleteer I remember when peoo0ple thought computers would never figure out chess as good as a human.... some people think yhis about coding and I think it's only a matter of time before llms can exceed 99.99% of all humans, then eventually all of them like they did with chess, go, starcraft. Etc.
Does that mean we should use them and be reliant? No. Just cuz you have a screw gun doesn't mean sometimes it makes more sense to use a screw driver.
@ Programming is not a game. Game is a clear goal within restricted rule set. Programming is about understanding the problem and the correct solution, surprisingly often best solution is to not program anything. Coding itself is the formalization of the solution to a machine, maybe AI would be useful in this step but so far I'm not convinced.
The first AI hype I witnessed was mid 90's neural networks. What we have now is the same thing but with insane computing resources. Fundamentally AI today has the same problems as back then.
I wouldn't blame AI exactly - the general rot in skill levels across the industry has been going on for a long time, at least 15 years. AI will probably make it _worse_ but we were already at a point years ago where most junior and intermediate - and far too many "senior" - developers just didn't have a clue about what used to be considered the basics, and were simply incapable of even attempting to solve a problem themselves.
Given that if they tried they would get reprimanded for being "slow" so the right thing to do is what meets expectations.
@@Aryeh-o this is the take
In keeping an "open mind", there's already 2 kinds of code bases: those that only rely on super basic tools like notepad/neovim and those that rely on IDEs.
Perhaps there's another kind of codebase are the only meaningful way to interact with them is through an AI/LLM tool. Don't know when that'll happen, but I do know it's the latest scapegoat for over-hiring due to unrealistically high expectations of "always online" behavior from unforeseen events at the beginning of the 2020s that speculative investors expected to last forever.
That might be the fear in hand. The bottom 99% vs top 1% battle isn't going away and the trade off between short term solutioning and long term maintenance mentioned in the article couldn't be any stronger indicator of those fears employees have just like automation in the 1950s during a weak business cycle like now.
Such an interesting thought that maybe codebases eventually become things we just navigate with LLMs... Thanks for your comment!
@DevLeader I wouldn't read into the comment to say we must make our codebases so complicated we only can navigate them through an LLM; instead, do the best you can to make the code so easy to navigate you don't "need" LLM tools to make complicated code changes. It's all a matter of interpreting, sympathizing, and negotiating business requirements together with stakeholders.
I believe there's a void in the market for sanely and simply managing business requirement networks no one seems to jump at because they believe code was already the simplest way of managing business requirements at scale. Maybe the new tool requires mathematics, but that's the reality every business faces that gets them stuck with code. It is because at this point, code is the most cost effective way of simultaneously managing requirements and implementation details for the business rules to be enforced by specific hardware. Looking at all the dependencies and hardware details that enforce real and _hard_ limitations on business requirements, it's safe to say software engineering is safe from the grasps for machine automation outside of minimum viable products that are merely just loose interpretations of our business requirements now.
Everything can be done in neovim.
@@tallenpeli5365 But does it mean it always "should" be done on neovim?
Programmer/Analyst here. Am not and have never been a "dev". Retired. Currently active only when my home grown tools go south in some way. Either an outright fail, or I feel the need for speed doing something I'm messing around with.
The need for good analysis of the problem itself was an issue emphasized in my arcane training. What's going on in the real world process your system handles? Better solutions don't come from efficiently handling something that is almost the real problem. Accelerated development can permit iterative tuning. It can also encourage a release and forget attitude toward your projects.
My closing neo-luddite complaint is directed at designers/developers who muddle up interfaces that were already nicely functional. To me it feels like it's something they did just so they'll have a job.
I wrote the article! Thanks for sharing
Well thank you very much for writing an excellent article 🙂
man just when im already illiterate from playing MTG 😔
I believe in you! 😅
Does using a chainsaw and relying upon it make a man weak? Not necessarily but sure makes it easier when not having to rely on effort to produce
I'm using Copilot now; I still read and fix my errors. Also, AI doesn't always generate the right code for the context. So, you still have to study whatever framework you're working with. AI does help make things go faster though.
AI can generate a template, if you are doing anything more demanding, they way you need to prompt it starts to be just as detailed as the code you would need to write. It has plenty of uses, but more in the code maintenance side. When updating your code it's really useful to doing all the million little changes that are repetitive but not standard enough for "find & replace". You will likely need to teach the change to it few times, but it does catch on. It is annoyingly bad at somethings I specifically would like a coding tool to be accurate with, like syntax.
I wouldn't call ai just another tool. Tools help code. Ai codes for you
@@majidaldo so that makes it not a tool? Or it makes it a better tool?
It's another tool -- a powerful one.
@DevLeader im just saying it's in another category altogether
So IDEs aren't tools when they give a list of possible methods after you hit . after an object?
Or are they not tools when they suggest most likely method you want to call after hittin .?
Or are they not tools when they auto use the most likely method you want to call after .?
Or are they not tools when they write ghost code you can select by hitting tab?
Or are they not tools when they transform pseudocode to actual code?
Or are they not tools when they transform natural language to code?
Ofcourse it's a tool. The line between tool and "another category" is simply too arbitary.
@@aev6075 my comment answers: IDEs helps *you code*. AI codes *for you*.
@@aev6075 the line between them is clear.
I can touch type code and am fluent in the languages I use. Stack Overflow and documentation usually have answers to my questions. What freaks me out about all of this LLM stuff is finding out that I'm not being challenged very much. Like it's not ok to just chill and do my job without adding AI to my workflow.
There's definitely a big push for adding AI into workflows, but I think it's going to take some getting used to and finding where it works effectively -- an individual thing!
Last week I just realized that over utilizing AI made me slower on the job. I do computational biology research and was just spamming chat gpt on the daily for some silly plotting in matplotlib. then did it for graph filtering. then for modifying a torch loss function to fit some graph diffusion method.
Next thing you know I’m frustrated at my chair looking at gpt and wondering why things just don’t work out of the box, when actually switching tabs and opening SO and documentation could’ve gotten me an answer faster and helped me actually assimilate how to do things. Feels like AI just sends you into this brain rot mode where you completely lose sight of the problem. Have avoided it for anything code-related since
Yeah you can do kiddie scripts with AI. No money can be made with AI coding. No one will hire you if you code with AI.
I think this is an opinion, but it's disproven with data. For example, in my vlogs I've mentioned several times a friend of mine that secured a contract for building a software solution. He used AI to build the entire thing. There are also plenty of examples of people getting hired and using only AI. Now, I'm not saying any of this is "best practice", but... It is in fact reality.
You clearly do not understand the capability of AI in coding. It's better than you. Look what o3 can do, jfc.
Great video! Do you think it’s still worth it to get a computer science degree? Or put years in learning to code? Do you think ai will take all these jobs if you’re 18 and need 4 years of college. Thanks for the great video, giving you a follow
Thanks very much!
I absolutely still think it's worth it. People are correlating AI to replacing humans or obsoleting them -- but I don't share that perspective. AI will absolutely change how we work though (significantly).
Let's pretend AI does replace engineers. I'm an engineering manager and that means I won't have a team at all anymore. Either I get good at managing AI agents (but why don't they just replace me with an AI supervisor that doesn't even have to deal with people challenges) OR... I find something else to do.
You know what that something else would be? Building software. There is no shortage of software that can be built.
I think it's interesting times ahead. I think they'll be very different times as we go forward. But software still needs to be built and nobody is taking that ability from you 🙂
@ thank you for the great response and sharing your knowledge. I’m in school and I’m leaning that there is so many routes in tech to go down. Web development, data engineering, cybersecurity, ml/ai engineering, and many more. What specializations do you think will grow the most say over the next 5-10 years. I find them all interesting but want to try and dive deeper in a specialization outside my normal coursework. Thank you for the great content appreciated for us newbies
I can put it this way ... I once got Visual Studio 2008 Pro for Christmas as a teenager. And then built an OS with it, lol. I don't feel "over-reliant" on AI at all, but I think we definitely do rely on tooling a lot. AI is a good time-saver and tool, but relying on it completely to do things you haven't learned to do is not productive use of time.
That's been my philosophy (and remains that way) but I'm certainly curious to see if things change haha
Just trying to keep an open mind on it -- maybe how I've had success learning becomes less applicable with what we have access to.
lol I'm trying to get into data analyst path >> someday into baby data sci/eng role
(from totally unrelated field)
...I am "abusing" Claude to learn. If anyone knows alternatives//think I should stop let me know. I haven't used Cursor but very tempted.
I love using it for autocomplete, that's it.
Once more devs depend on AI these companies will soon charge you per prompt. Its gonna get ugly and it will get ugly fast!
There are already a million AI tools that charge you per operation you perform because there's a cost per token associated with the models. Some companies bake this into their monthly cost, others give you some token allowance (usually an abstraction over the actual LLM tokens).
So... This has already been happening since the start? 🙂
Deep seek
@@am-fq8lz insightful
@@DevLeader 🤣
Good video!!! 👍
Thanks very much!
What's with the 'they'? The writer is just one person, right?
@scififan698 I do not know the author's gender even if I could assume by their name -- I'm not familiar with it.
The more grammatically correct thing I've been taught is to say "he or she", but I think that I'd be constantly slipping up on that based on my experience -- so "they" it is.
I just don't like assuming everyone is a dude in software development.
"They" can be applied to just one person. That is a perfectly correct usage of the word.
@@inviktus1983 my English teachers in my earlier school years trying to correct grammar 🙂 I'm just a computer dude trying his best.
@ you're doin fine
This topic strikes me deep
This video sounded like a chatGPT answer. Repeating the same thing 3 times, overly polite, warning 3 times about statements that are as controversial as not liking coffee.
@@vhyjbdfyhvjybv9614 this comment read like a typical Internet troll. Thank you for your engagement, your watch time contribution is appreciated.
@DevLeader I'm just expressing my unconstructive opinion, this is not trolling 😉
Oh my mistake.
Maybe just maybe if programming language maintainers stopped introducing stupid bullshit like lambda functions, we wouldn't be in this mess.
What do lambda functions have to do with anything here?
@@ollicron7397 I want to see you cook here. I'm so curious if function pointers, macros, or anything outside a calculator's capabilities shouldn't exist either.
The floor is yours. What is your "ultimate minimal and awesome programming language"? If one doesn't exist, what would your language have?