I love Doctorow, but I think his bit about hallucinating library names needs a rethink.
In a world where you're on the hook for the code your AI writes, the job is code review, but it's just as much about wiring up tests and linters and type checkers so that errors of that kind are noticed and fixed by the AI before you even see the draft that got abandoned.
If I had to share an example about the subtle and then suddenly not so subtle ways that AI is gonna disappoint a coder it would be about the time I asked it to update my flake.nix such that kustomize 4.5 was installed instead of 4.6, and instead of sourcing the older code it patched the current version such that the output of --version was "4.5".
I'm a human and when struggling with some flake.nix I sometimes want to do what the AI did.
Yeah, I hear you. I've occasionally succumbed and cut some corners in my day. But in this case, it was a load bearing corner--the deception didn't last long and it was pretty embarrassing for me.
...And the AI got trained on this.
viz., fingers.