It’s a weird time to be a software developer

Half the industry seems to be convinced that writing code by hand is soon to be as obsolete as punchcards. The other half seems to be equally convinced that not writing code by hand automatically means you’re writing unmaintainable “slop” and will pay the price next dev cycle.

Who’s right? Guess we’ll find out after it’s too late. Either way.

The ergonomics of different development environments mirrors this:

If you’re the first type, you use AI from somethign like Copilot Desktop, which basically assumes you’re not going to look at the code. You open an issue, you tell the AI to build a fix for it, it then YOLOs code into a pull request. Maybe you’ll review it, maybe not.

If you’re the second type, you use AI inside of your IDE instead, where you can keep a close eye on every line it changes; and you keep your finger hovering over the “stop” button while the chain-of-thought reasoning scrolls by.

The telling point is that there no longer seems to be the third type of developer, much. The ones who don’t use AI at all.

(For what it’s worth, I’m the second type but am rapidly evolving into the first type the more I work with it. I still have my finger hovering over the ‘stop’ button, and I’d rather do my own testing than trust the AI to run its own unit tests — but there are longer and longer intervals where I don’t have to interrupt or to tweak its output; and the code doesn’t look any more unmaintainable than what I see from human developers. I don’t know, though. Ask me again in six months, after it’s too late.)