As a senior developer, I use the new AIs. They’re absolutely amazing and a huge timesaver if you use them well. As with any powerful tool, it’s possible to over-use and under-use it, and not achieve those gains.
However, I disagree with the comparison to knowing how hardware works. There’s a pretty big difference between these 2 things:
Letting a company else design and maintain the hardware or a library and not understanding the internals yourself.
Letting a someone/something design and implement a core part of your code that you are responsible for maintaining, and not understanding how it works yourself.
I am not responsible for maintaining ReactJS or my Intel CPU. Not understanding it means there might be some performance lost.
I am responsible for the product my company produces. All of our code needs to be understood in-house. You can outsource creation of it, or have an LLM do it, but the company needs to understand it internally.
As a senior developer, I use the new AIs. They’re absolutely amazing and a huge timesaver if you use them well. As with any powerful tool, it’s possible to over-use and under-use it, and not achieve those gains.
However, I disagree with the comparison to knowing how hardware works. There’s a pretty big difference between these 2 things:
Letting a company else design and maintain the hardware or a library and not understanding the internals yourself.
Letting a someone/something design and implement a core part of your code that you are responsible for maintaining, and not understanding how it works yourself.
I am not responsible for maintaining ReactJS or my Intel CPU. Not understanding it means there might be some performance lost.
I am responsible for the product my company produces. All of our code needs to be understood in-house. You can outsource creation of it, or have an LLM do it, but the company needs to understand it internally.