AI changes coding work, but code knowledge still matters

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:40

   And pardon maybe the history lesson, but like I go back like, so the first, do you know the original definition of the term calculator? Do you know what that referred to? No. I referred to people, right? So back before there were like electronic calculators or computers or any of these things, the way that you would actually do computing, the way that you would do calculating, like the way that an insurance company would calculate actuarial tables or the military would like calculate, you know, I don't know, whatever troop logistics formulas or whatever.

2. 43:10

   it was, the way that you would do it is you would actually have a room full of people. And by the way, these are big rooms. You can have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people doing this. And you would actually figure out, you have somebody at the head of the room who is responsible for whatever the mathematical equation was. And then they would parcel out the individual mathematical calculations to people sitting at desks who were doing them all by hand.

3. 43:31

   And that job title was those people were calculators. And so we've gone from a world in which you literally have people doing mathematical equations by hand. Then we got the first computers. The first computers, of course, didn't have programming languages. They only had machine code. So the first computers were programmed with ones and zeros. And so the task of the programmer became do the ones and zeros. And then that became punch cards. And you can still, there's still people kicking today whose job as a programmer was to build the punch cards. And then you got actually this big breakthrough, which was called assembly language, which was basically the way to do machine code, but with some level of English added to it. And then the best programmers did assembly language. And then when I was coming up, it was higher level languages like

4. 44:15

   C that compiled into machine code. And that's what programmers did. And then I still remember when scripting languages, we developed JavaScript and Netscape, and then Python took off and Perl and these other scripting languages. When scripting languages took off in the 2000s, there was this big fight in the technical community, which is, is scripting real programming or not, right? Because it's like it's kind of cheating, right?

5. 44:37

   Because real programmers write code that compiles to machine code. And like real programmers like do like memory management themselves. And they do all, you know, this whole craft of writing, you know, writing C code. And, you know, these JavaScript or Pythed programmers are just doing this kind of lightweight thing. It doesn't even really count as coding. And of course, the answer is yes, it very much counted.

6. 44:54

   And now most coding is done with the scripting languages, right? Which you see my point. The scripting languages have abstracted away like five layers of detail underneath that that people used to do by hand and they don't anymore. And then to your point, like AI coding is the next layer on that. AI coding actually abstracts the way the process of actually writing the scripting code, right? And so in one sense, this is a really big deal for all the obvious reasons.

7. 45:16

   But on the other hand, it's like, okay, this is the next layer of the task redefinition under the job of programmer, right? Now, what's the job of the programmer? It's to your point. It's not necessarily to write the code by hand. But what it is now is, all right, if you talk to the world's best programmers today, what they'll tell you is, oh, my job is I'm sitting there and I'm orchestrating 10 code bots, right? Coding bots that are running in parallel, right? And literally, they sit there and they shift from browser, you know, browser to browser, terminal to terminal. And their day job now is kind of arguing with AI bots to try to get them to like write the right code, right? And then debug it and fix the problems and change the spec and do all these things. And so now the job of the program is to argue with the coding bots. But like, if you don't know how to write the code

8. 45:59

   yourself, you don't know how to evaluate what the coding bots are giving you. Right? And so, you know, you asked about the 10, you know, our 10 year old is, you know, super into computers and super into programming. And what I'm, what I'm telling you, you know, he's using Claude and ChatGPT and Copilot and all these things. And what I'm telling him is like, look, and by the way, he loves vibe coding. He's on Replit all the time doing vibe coding, you know, doing games, you know, he's sitting there, you know, it's hysterical, right? Because he's sitting there. It's a 10 year old basically who's, you know, spends two hours of dinner arguing with an AI for fun. Right? Right. But, but what I'm telling him is no, look, you need to still fully understand and learn how to write and understand code because the coding

9. 46:33

   bots are giving you code. If it doesn't work, or if it's not doing what you expect, or it's not fast enough or whatever, like you need to be able to understand the results of what the AI is giving you, right? In the same way that somebody who's writing scripting language code does need to understand ultimately how the microprocessor works. And so again, it's kind of this up leveling of capability, where you actually want the depth to be able to go down and be able to understand what the thing is actually doing, even if you're not spending your day actually doing that by hand.

10. 46:57

    And again, I look at that and I'm like, okay, now programmers are going to be 10 times or 100 times or 1,000 times more productive than they used to be. And that is overwhelmingly a good thing. The tasks are definitely changing. The nature of the job is changing. But are human beings going to be involved in the coding process and overseeing the AI coding and all that? And the answer is, of course, absolutely 100%.

11. 47:20

    No question. So you're in the camp of still learning to cope, still a valuable skill. Oh, yeah, totally. Well, again, if you want to be one of these super, look, if you just want to put yourself in autopilot and like, I can't be bothered and I'm just going to have AI write the code and it's going to generate whatever it does and that's fine. And I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be, if the goal is to be a mediocre coder, then just let the AI do it.

12. 47:41

    It's fine. The AI is going to be perfectly good at generating infinite amounts of mediocre code. No problem. It's all good. If the goal is I want to be one of the best software people in the world and I want to build new software products and technologies that like really matter, then yeah, you 100% want, You want to go all the way down. You want your skill set to go all the way down to assembly and machine code.

13. 47:59

    You want to understand every layer of the stack. You want to deeply understand what's happening at the level of the chip and the network and so forth. By the way, you also really deeply want to understand how the AI itself works. Because if people don't understand how the AI works, they're clearly able to get more value out of it than somebody who doesn't understand how it works. You're always more productive if you know how the machine works when you use the machine.

14. 48:20

    And so, yeah, the super empowered individual on the other end of this that wants to do great things with the new technology, yes, you 100% want to understand this thing all the way down the stack. Because you want to be able to understand what it's giving you, right? And when something doesn't work or when something isn't right, you want to be able to really quickly understand why that is. By the way, again, this goes back to education.

15. 48:39

    AI is your best friend at helping you learn all that, right? Because it's like, oh, I need to understand. I don't know, like this isn't fast enough. I need to figure out as a coder, I need to figure out how to do a different approach to memory management or something. And you can be like, well, you know, shit, like I don't quite know how to do that. Okay, AI, let's spend 10 minutes. Teach me how to do this, right?

16. 48:59

    Teach me what this all means, right? So all of a sudden you have this like incredibly synergistic relationship with AI where it's also helping you get better at the same time that it's doing a lot of work for you. By the way, I was gonna say, I was a big Pearl programmer. I was an engineer for 10 years and that was my language of choice. Do you remember, I don't know when you were doing it,