Okay, that title may be a bit click-baity. But I was watching a video blog recently and it made me think a little, though not quite in the direction the blog may have intended.
There’s a group of streamers I’ve become somewhat enamored with and the particular video blog that started this line of thought was “Being Competent With Coding Is More Fun” by the ThePrimeagen. Or, in this case, his alter ego, TheVimegean.
The short form of the story is he tried using AI to shortcut his prototyping and then ended up spending even more time debugging. His punchline, just read the docs.
Oddly, rather than validating my own thoughts on AI, it got me thinking in a different direction. For those who don’t know, I’ve been unemployed for some time and quite confused by it. Everything about my experience and resume that once worked so well for me when job hunting in the past, now seemed to literally be working against me.
Shortcutting some of the thought process, it made think about what job I really did. Not what my resume says. I’ve always said my “real job” was Troubleshooter. This manifested itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes it was doing a prototype or proof of concept. Sometimes a version 1.0, also known as an “honest” prototype because it was created in the same manner as a prototype but always intended to release. Sometimes, it was actually solving a problem that had the current team stumped.
The one thing in common with most of my “solutions” is they were incomplete. In fact, the work I did was very likely headed for the bit bucket. What it did, was get the team past their current dilemma and put them back on track. It answered the question of “why” it wasn’t working. But the actual code itself, was not worth keeping.
This is when I realized my superpower might actually have been outsourced to AI. It was an interesting concept.
Part of the problem with all the discussions on AI is that results vary. Some folks have very good experiences with AI, others, very negative. Currently, there is not a lot of in between. This suggests to me the hype, on both sides, is obscuring the real value. And, perhaps, like my own efforts, sometimes may be hard to appreciate.
As The Primeagen found out, AI doesn’t actually save you time. But what it CAN do is get you past that point of just plain not knowing what’s going wrong. But the expectation SHOULD be that what is produced by the AI (like the solutions I usually provide) should provide understanding, but not an actual solution. You’re still going to have to read the docs. But perhaps now, you’ll be able to make more sense of them.
Give it some thought, while I re-write my resume…