To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?
This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.
I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
I am not "against" AI programming, although I confess I don't really know what that means... coders and business folk are gonna do whatever gets the job done and opinions by and large matter not a whit.
However:
> ..it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.
Right, but... approximately zero users of AI for coding are setting temperature to 0 not to mention changing temperature at all. So this is a comparison to a world that doesn't really exist.
Additionally, C code compiles much much closer to the same assembly and microcode regardless of compiler as compared to temperature zero prompts across different AIs.
Compiling the symbols into a binary is not the bottleneck. Formalizing the contract for interacting with the real world is and always has been the bottleneck.
Nah, it's the 50 tabs in my browser that I no longer have to open before I know the correct incantation to type. I bet someone knows how many tabs an average deveoper is keeping opened when working (like Google or someone with a nasty spying browser extension) - would be cool to see that plotted against the fraction of Github commits that are co-authored by Claude. I predict a fairly tight negative correlation.
I have to sign off on the code. When I use compilers and 3rd-party libraries, I choose them very carefully. When I use an AI assistant, I have to check that it produces a good enough quality that I can sign off on it and stand behind it as if it was my own. I cannot do that with large amounts of agentic code, only with small enough snippets that I can overlook and check.
You can put it another way: If my customers lose data because of a nasty bug and it was because there was an error in the compiler, it wasn't my fault (unless I chose some unfinished hobby compiler with no reputation at all). If my AI assistant wrote the bug and I didn't spot it, the bug was definitely my fault and is fully my responsibility.
"It wasn't me, my AI assistant did it" is a lousy excuse.
I dislike it when rhetorical flourishes start with "honest question...".
Maybe using AI assistant instead of directly writing code is equivalent to using a high level language instead of assembly and maybe it isn't. So at least begin your discussion as "I think programmers who don't use AI are like programmers who insist on assembly rather than a high level language" (and they existed back in the day). I mean, an "honest question" is one where you are honestly unsure whether you will get an answer or what the answer will be. That's completely different from honestly feeling your opponents have no good arguments. Just about the opposite, really.
By the way, the reason I view AI assistants and high level language compilers as fundamentally different is that high level languages compilers are mostly deterministic, mostly you can determine both the code generated and the behavior of code in terms of the high level language. AI created/assisted code is fundamentally undermined relative to the source (a prompt) on a much wider basis than the assembly created by a high level language compiler (whose source is source code).
Edit: formatting