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Today I read “A cartoonist’s review of AI art” by The Oatmeal today and it got me thinking a little bit about AI and what I do: programming.
I’ve used AI to do a few things and it actually helped me and sped things up quite a bit. Like a lot. And it did the things I didn’t want to do, the boring stuff, the recursing through folders, adding React to a Rails project, scraping a webpage for the title.
The AI Agent made it easy to get past the boring stuff and focus on the fun and interesting stuff.
But in almost every case I’ve had to get the AI to go back, do something different than it originally did, or call a method with the correct arguments. In a few cases I had to tell the AI Agent what it did wrong and how to fix it.
We can sometimes be snobby about programming, and how ✨ elegant ✨ our solution was to the problem.. but programming isn’t art. Just like art, programming requires years of training and practice to be good at it. I’d say most programmers, most of the time, are not pouring their heart and soul into their software; they’re trying to meet a timeline, they’re trying to tame a bug. Its work.
You can tell when a programmer is putting his soul into his work. There is something special about it. I don’t think letting AI do the “administrative work” or the boring, tedious stuff takes the edge off. You can use the AI as your paintbrush the same as your keyboard.
In the end its not the elegance of the solution that matters. Its getting the project finished. Getting that software to a user. That is what matters.
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