Forrest Brazeal:
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Simon Willisonreplied to Hynek Schlawack last edited by
@hynek I certainly won’t deny that there are an incredible new array of footguns now available to anyone who wants them
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@simon QA has always had the problem of people treating it as "dumber" than engineering. If management replaces specialized developers with AI, it'd be hard to argue they shouldn't do the same with QA (let alone, *increase* the QA department.)
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@AlSweigart maybe QA will finally get the respect it deserves?
I can dream!
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Simon Willisonreplied to Simon Willison last edited by
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@simon I don’t buy that at all. It’s true that many technical developer skills transfer well to other programming languages, but I’ve also seen and experienced for decades now that truly understanding an ecosystem (like learning to speak a foreign language near-native, including social, political, cultural aspects) is a long and slow process. AI might help, but it won’t make you proficient over night.
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@ujay68 there’s fluent, but there’s a level below that where you can build and ship small (not large) projects with confidence despite not knowing the language inside out - that’s where I am now with AI-assisted development for Go and jq and Bash and Dockerfile and AppleScript
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In my day job, I deal daily with professional developers, unassisted by AI, who manage to ship products that people use, that the company makes money off of - and that can and often do have security holes you can drive a truck through. It's my job to understand the environment, the players, and our own developers enough to sort out the gaps and force corrections that our experienced-in-that-environment developers still missed.
One big very common failing is "It worked when I tried it - ship it!" As opposed to "this is correct and secure - ship it".
Iterating with an AI gets you "it works!" Code - not "it's correct" code. Running without errors is no guarantee the output is correct. Getting correct output once won't guarantee it's consistently so. And secure/compliant? That's a whole other thing. You eschew experts at your own peril.
The hidden cost of not hiring experienced IT folks is you get what you pay for - and will pay the difference in other ways. Fair warning.
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@tbortels I think I agree with everything you just said
Becoming an effective, responsible developer who can reliably produce quality software is a journey
I’m excited that LLM-assistance, applied in the right way, might help accelerate people on that journey - and can help a massive boost for people who have managed to develop those core skills