You can find videos of people online using A.I. Tools to create something like a calculator app in a matter of moments. For people who are just starting out learning to code, this can be a little disheartening. No one can code a calculator by hand in a matter of seconds! It can be easy to feel like giving up in the face of such technological advances.
Here’s the thing though, everyone and their dog has followed a tutorial to make a calculator app. There are probably thousands of examples of this out there. Once you understand how A.I. works it starts to become a little less worrisome for those of us who write code, or aspire to write code for a living.
How does it work?
People are largely mystified by A.I. and they tend to attribute more intelligence to it than it actually has. A.I. is just a computer program, it is a pretty advanced one, and it’s very useful, but it’s not magical. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on lots of data, and essentially they use algorithms to predict the next word. It is essentially a more complicated version of predictive text.
So when we come back to the calculator example, there are lots of examples of calculator apps, and calculator app tutorials on the internet. An LLM like ChatGPT is going to have lots of examples to draw from, and thus it can reproduce a calculator very quickly.
When it comes to more complicated coding problems, LLMs are a lot less competent. As someone who has utilized Cursor (an A.I. Coding Interface) for real world examples, I can tell you that it is significantly less impressive.
Should I be worried?
No, you shouldn’t be worried. At the moment A.I. needs to be coached heavily by someone who understands how to code. It frequently makes basic errors and constantly needs to be checked and revised. When you see examples of people “vibe coding” impressive things such as games, these are usually always people who understand how to code and can therefore prompt the A.I. effectively, as well as understand how to debug and fix the code that it produces.
It is definitely prudent to start to learn how to use these tools yourself. Cursor’s tab feature alone saves a lot of time. And you will remain competitive in the job market if you learn these tools, but if you are a developer, or you are getting started learning development, you should not become disheartened, or feel threatened by these tools. There is a general narrative about A.I., how it is going to take over, and enslave us etc. Also people don’t understand it, so there is an air of mystery surrounding it. This can lead us to treat it like something to be afraid of, but really we should just change our mindset and view it as a tool, not that much different from an addon to VSCode that gives us a shortcut to boilerplate HTML or something.
What about the future?
In the future these tools are liable to improve, but that is all the more reason to get acquainted with them now. As developers, we are ahead of most people when it comes to tech, and as A.I. becomes more and more prevalent, those of us who are good at utilizing it will not get left behind. The idea that A.I. is just going to keep advancing exponentially is pure speculation anyway, but even if it does, and all developers get replaced by it in the future, being one of the people who learns to utilize it now is going to put you ahead of most people.