The premise of this argument is that using AI takes no skill, and experience using AI doesn't matter, and that domain expertise in software development won't help you build better software with AI.
I don't think any of those things are true.
The premise of this argument is that using AI takes no skill, and experience using AI doesn't matter, and that domain expertise in software development won't help you build better software with AI.
I don't think any of those things are true.
I think you'll find most of the people creating the HTTP proxy servers and brand new AI harnesses and git or ssh config managers and all of the other things that we already have way too many versions of are not our best software engineers anyhow. I like to analyze things in terms of how much of the real world they've encountered [1], and one of the reasons I would just put my own solutions together is a lot of these manifested major projects with huge lists of "features" have either one user, or in many cases, zero, which is to say even the author isn't actually using it, and I might as well put together my 1-user project myself.
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
A person maintaining a sizeable open-source project is overwhelmingly likely to have all three.
Right after I posted, I realized this hole in what I was saying.
Reflecting a bit more, I agree with you, but only in cases where the author of the open source project doesn't aggressively shun the use of AI in their own work. Folks that refuse to engage with AI (even open source project maintainers) will find themselves lacking the skill with AI that others have. So I can imagine a future where those open-source maintainers will get pull requests written with AI that they themselves could never produce.
I'm not sure I believe my own argument here, but I think it follows from "using AI to produce something worthwhile is a skill".
I think the argument is more that jerf has that skill, experience, and domain expertise.