Scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, wrote a lengthy post about how programming has changed beyond recognition over the past two months. This is all thanks to AI agents. They write their own code and find solutions to the problems they encounter along the way.
As an example, Karpathy shared how, at a single prompt, an agent wrote him software for analyzing video from home cameras. Just three months ago, writing and debugging the code would have taken an entire weekend, but today, the AI can handle it in half an hour, without requiring human intervention.
He also notes that to get the best results from AI, you need to be a good developer. It's important to understand what the agent is doing on your behalf, what tools are available, and what's difficult and what's easy for it. In other words, it's not magic, but delegation.
This.
This is very true, but the question is: Its fine for this generation, where are the future good developers coming from though?
There doesn't seem to be much incentive for current 3 year olds to ever learn how to actually program. Its a weird time....have we as humans ever collectively lost the ability to understand tech that we currently depend on? It seems like we are on the cusp on that....
Yeah, it's an interesting time we live in.
If my son ever asks me whether he should learn another language other than his mother tongue, because, anyhow, we have devices now that can do instant translation, I'll probably answer that having the tech do it for you does not remove all the other benefits of learning a language. And I hope that his personal experience learning languages will corroborate this. If it does, then I can probably also figure out a way to teach him the importance of learning how to code, even though LLMs can do a lot for you. In the same way that I had to learn my multiplication tables, even though a calculator could do it for me.
Interesting times...
This is very true for this generation of AI also. You may no longer need to be a good or even competent developer in a couple years, as fast as things are going.
Here, he's highlighting the importance of computational thinking, as described in this 20yo article
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kh5f71ye5t47he13bhx5q5qz
https://twiiit.com/karpathy/status/2026731645169185220