As a senior developer, I use the new AIs. They’re absolutely amazing and a huge timesaver if you use them well. As with any powerful tool, it’s possible to over-use and under-use it, and not achieve those gains.

However, I disagree with the comparison to knowing how hardware works. There’s a pretty big difference between these 2 things:

Letting a company else design and maintain the hardware or a library and not understanding the internals yourself.

Letting a someone/something design and implement a core part of your code that you are responsible for maintaining, and not understanding how it works yourself.

I am not responsible for maintaining ReactJS or my Intel CPU. Not understanding it means there might be some performance lost.

I am responsible for the product my company produces. All of our code needs to be understood in-house. You can outsource creation of it, or have an LLM do it, but the company needs to understand it internally.

I don’t think the article means dogfooding. I think they mean that you can’t design a system unless you’re intimately involved with coding it.

And of course that’s still wrong. It happens all the time. And things end up working out the majority of the time.

Most of the people I hear being critical of AI Coding are very clear about what it’s good for, and what it isn’t.

If someone is wholly for or against something, their advice generally isn’t very good.+

A lot of people see an upvote as a signal that they endorse the message, or at least want it to spread.

A downvote is the opposite of that.

You’ll never convince people not to “shoot the messenger” on link aggregators because it’s antithetical to their view of the system.

Apparently not. I had to click a few pages into their site for this:

“While Eclipse Theia incorporates certain components from Visual Studio Code, such as the Monaco editor, it is independently developed with a modular architecture and is not a fork of VS Code.”