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Man this cut like a knife. Perfectly put into words the dichotomy I've felt with AI coding. Anyone else?

I think the skills we need to lean into are the problem solving skills, for the business, and for the customer. The code is a means to the end of happy customers paying us for useful things.

I agree. But, the brutal truth is that the coding skill I've spent decades building is becoming a commodity like never before. I've always enjoyed the craft of good software and I feel like an artisan shoe maker in the age of Nike.

That's a very clever and sharp analogy - artisan shoe maker in the age of Nike. I wish you were wronger.

I understand the sentiment. But I still think we’re miles from being able to drop a reliance on good software engineers who can understand and fix all the code that’s being generated.

Agreed we still need to hand hold & review output. But, I feel like I'm seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe I'm just grieving over what feels like a cheapening of the first layer of the skill stack: hands to keyboard coding, something many of us have spent years and years crafting.

Well that’s a hell of a thought

I don’t mean to invalidate the feeling. I’ve been through it many times in waves. The first time I remember feeling that was when the first version of copilot was released. That was before ChatGPT even came out.

Maybe it’s cope, but I still can’t see how a developer can work with AI without the ability to code by hand. And I’m still convinced that the apparent speed gains are mostly false economies, or at least, are significantly less impactful in the long term than we initially estimate.