First, I love this analogy. At the end of the day someone is still analyzing and decomposing problems, and whether you use AI primarily to search and summarize, to recommend, or to write some goofy starter unit tests, it should still be the human writing the code.

… and now I can’t unsee this rule of three crap. Ever since I heard about an author getting busted for using AI, and all the talk about how AI generates in “rule of three”, I keep looking at my own writing and saying “wait, I do this too. People are going to think my posts are by an AI.” Every part of this post was written by a human software developer on a cell phone while I should be getting ready for work instead.

Also I feel like pointing out: assembler is the human-accessible version, where you break code into files and procedures, give things useful names, you have a symbol table that gives you the addresses where your names ended up. You can insert things and edit things and all the addresses shift around to accommodate your changes automatically. You add comments, even block comments. You “inline” methods with assembler macros.

I would say assembler is more accessible than people think, and complex programs don’t require as much of the “hold everything in your brain at once” horsepower as people think.

99%? We can get these numbers lower :-)

Only that the compiler works in a defined algorithmic way that can always be expected to work, at worst it uses more cpu registers than needed or something. AI on the other hand just spews garbage in a fundamentally statistical way and despite the enormous efforts to create tools that manipulate it into working more predictably, it still sucks so much of the time.

Another difference is that you are critically thinking when “instructing” a compiler via the code, but you only convince yourself that you think critically when you’re instructing an AI, it’s not the same and it actively makes you a worse engineer every time you decide to use it instead of thinking.