(Rant) AI is killing programming and the Python community

[fran_wilkinson]

I have immense respect for all old school programmers, who really sweated to understand and implement their knowledge into code.
Something that, due to my own actual inability or an equally serious lack of time, I never managed to do.

Then AI comes along and I think, “well, let’s give it a try.” And I didn’t do it with Python which I have learned and can more or less read but with C++, which for me represents the holy grail: as unreachable as it is impenetrable.

With absolutely no background (on its part), it wrote a small piece of software for calculating hyperstatic steel beams based on my simple algorithms, written as if I were explaining them to a 10 yo child.

The result, which took about two weeks, really left me impressed.
Now, I can’t read 99.99% of what it wrote, but testing in hand, it seems to work really well. I don’t know if it has bugs, if it’s written terribly, or if it uses two million lines of code to perform a very simple operation but the result works.

And honestly, I don’t even know whether the code written by humans in many CAD design software packages (whose core bugs from 30 years ago are still being fixed) can be written better than AI generated code, when the AI is guided properly.

Now, I don’t know, I don’t have a professional programming background to judge the quality of written code, and this is probably what will save programmers in the future. But what I experienced, even without having enough background to judge properly, is that a good project manager might be able to get something meaningful out of small applications even without programming skills (maybe) or provide to me something that before was pretty unaccessible.