I can convey in speech in 8 hours what would take you a week to type.
Writing code is low level plebian work. I can convey thousands of lines of functions in a handful of sentences of plain English describing a task or complex high level function.
Writing code is low level plebian work. I can convey thousands of lines of functions in a handful of sentences of plain English describing a task or complex high level function.
No, you can't. Your speech will not cover every edge case; it will not cover exactly how data flows through the system; it will not specify the appropriate data structures and algorithms to use; it will be full of holes and inconsistencies. How do I know this? Because if you could say it in English to that level, then you could simply type it in a programming language even more easily.
Maybe it would take me a week to weed through your imprecise exposition to try to understand what you're actually trying to do, but it certainly does not take a week to type code; typing takes maybe 5% to 10% of my time. About 70% of my time is spent fleshing out the actual precise problem to solve, with the remaining 20% to 25% spent coming up with a good solution to that problem. Your 8-hour speech would not even precisely specify the problem you're trying to solve.
> Writing code is low level plebian work. I can convey thousands of lines of functions in a handful of sentences of plain English describing a task or complex high level function.
If a handful of plain-English sentences result in thousands of lines of code, either those plain-English sentences were unhelpful nonsense like "make me Facebook for dogs", or your code is massively over-complicated.
Honestly what I'm hearing from you is "I don't know how to write code". That's OK. What's not OK is turning your nose up at those people who actually do. You sound like one of those fresh MBA "idea guys" who has a "billion dollar idea" and just need someone to type the code for you for a generous 20%.
Just imagine someone saying "I could easily write a novel if I wanted to, but I'm not going to type it, because typing is for plebs. I'm an ideas man. I'll say what happens in the story, and I'll get some peon to actually type it into a novel." The person who says that is not "too good to be an author", they are a wannabe-author.
The thing is I don't see why ai couldn't do all that too. If it has decisions to be made that affect the outcome it can prompt me for input on them. Writing is slow. Not sure why I would bother with it tho if I can bang through the whole process by interacting at a concept/theory level instead.
I look at AI like a new compiler. I mean I could write machine level assembly and if I was a wizard who knew it in and out I'm sure it would be super efficient. But we basically don't do that for 99% of cases, we write in some other language and we use a compiler. AI is like a compiler for my plain ass basic bish English to code. Might be a bit rough round the edges now but I'm sure it'll be suitable for the vast majority of coding in a very short amount of time.
I say this as someone who has looked at AI generated code and was not impressed though, so this is probably still a long way off.
Another problem that I'm personally more concerned about is that this way of coding will allow for so many security flaws to be built into the code. Even if it builds something that matches your expectations for the prompt, what's stopping it from generating something vulnerable to attacks that leak all your users' data? Humans already struggle enough with this, and we're feeding all our flawed codebases into these models.
"Writing down code" is, perhaps, plebian work. Understanding a problem as expressed by humans and being able to connect that to the code to write, though, is where the real work is. Based on my experiences with ChatGPT and Copilot, AI isn't there yet. It's good at the plebian work, which is great, but it's hot garbage at the actually difficult thing.
Amateur, I can do much better. "Build a search engine that's better than Google at everything". Voila, the AI will start spinning up and come back with a very large, very complex system, and all it took was ten words.