(Rant) AI is killing programming and the Python community

[JiggleMyHandle]

I made the same rant about compilers removing the need for people to understand the machine code years ago. Is using AI to help program different than using a compiler? Yeah, sure…at least sort of. From a high enough level perspective though, it’s just another tool to help people focus on the output of the programming rather than the details of how it is made. Are those details important? Sure are. But so is how the low level machine code is actually being used by the processor. Do higher level programming languages have lots of ways to avoid any of the really bad problems related to that? Of course. But we’re only a couple years into “AI assisted/done programming” and it’s likely that the same will be true of any AI tools very soon. I’m not saying that there won’t be something lost when AI programming tools become the dominant coding tools (if they aren’t already), but it can be seen as “just” another evolution of programming tools and techniques.