One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
The thing is: Programming isn’t primarily about engineering. It’s primarily about communication.
That’s what allows developers to deliver working software without understanding how a compiler works: they can express ideas in terms of other ideas that already have a well-defined relationship to those technical components that they don’t understand.
That’s also why generative AI may end up setting us back a couple of decades. If you’re using AI to read and write the code, there is very little communicative intent making it through to the other developers. And it’s a self-reinforcing problem. There’s no use reading AI-generated code to try to understand the author’s mental model, because very little of their mental model makes it through to the code.
This is not a technical problem. This is a communication problem. And programmers in general don’t seem to be aware of that, which is why it’s going to metastasize so viciously.
If only it was just a problem of understanding.
The thing is: Programming isn’t primarily about engineering. It’s primarily about communication.
That’s what allows developers to deliver working software without understanding how a compiler works: they can express ideas in terms of other ideas that already have a well-defined relationship to those technical components that they don’t understand.
That’s also why generative AI may end up setting us back a couple of decades. If you’re using AI to read and write the code, there is very little communicative intent making it through to the other developers. And it’s a self-reinforcing problem. There’s no use reading AI-generated code to try to understand the author’s mental model, because very little of their mental model makes it through to the code.
This is not a technical problem. This is a communication problem. And programmers in general don’t seem to be aware of that, which is why it’s going to metastasize so viciously.