If everyone believes AI will replace us, what's the point of having students learn how to program?

[delegatevoid@mastodon.gamedev.place]

If everyone believes AI will replace us, what's the point of having students learn how to program? Serious question. (and I wish it was different).

[obsurveyor@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid Your junior dev AI equivalent needs more junior dev output grist for the AI mill. They can't ingest AI slop or they'll collapse.

[delegatevoid@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@obsurveyor I love programming, been doing it for over 2 decades, and I feel it's being pulled away from us, marginalized, as if AI can simply replace us. It's sad...
My son loves making games, but should I encourage him, or persuade him to pursue a different career...

[obsurveyor@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid It's so hard to tell right now. ☹️ I've got more time behind me as a developer than ahead. I'm never adopting the vibe coding AI style. Local code completion is the closest I get.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid simple. not everyone believes that, and also it won't make programming obsolete

[delegatevoid@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva I hope so

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid between all the studies that show ai makes you less productive, ai use makes your skills evaporate, and other things like there being listings for people to invest in companies that *don't* use ai and also banks are apparently starting to refuse to fund the construction of ai data centers; i think it is rather safe to say the people astroturfing it are full of shit

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid this is my favorite bit of supporting evidence so far to show that yes, this technology is massively overhyped, yes it is being pushed by charlatans and snake oil salesmen, and no it does not actually work as advertised https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid anecdotally, it seems like virtually all of the AI programming spam is attempts to get pull requests accepted into major open source projects, which I assume is either a concerted effort to trick them into lending credibility to these tools, or enterprising individuals with few scruples trying to pad their resumes without actually doing anything. I think that's interesting.

[mavnn@bonfire.mavnn.eu]

@delegatevoid@mastodon.gamedev.place @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place Even if the current AI tech is good enough to write all our code for us (which I don't think it is), we'd still want to teach people to code the same way that we still teach people to add up even though we have calculators. Even if you have a machine to do something for you, knowing how and why to do the thing in the first place is a valuable skill to understand the world around you and use the machine effectively. Having a calculator to do division for you doesn't help if you don't understand that division means splitting up an amount equally.

So... while I think "coding as a profession is going away!" is extremely likely to be untrue with current LLM based AI for both legal and technical reasons, I am absolutely certain that we will have valid reasons to teach people to code for a very long time yet.​

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mavnn @delegatevoid worst case scenario computer science finally stops being one of the fields that attracts incurious people whose only real ambitious are to make what they think is easy money. nothing is really lost there.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@delegatevoid oh another thing people have been pointing out. all of these companies are burning obscene amounts of money to offer these services way way way way way below the cost of operating them. my understanding is investors generally want to eventually see a return on investment.