Programmer Humor

It's even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like "Eh, don't worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you're doing and screw things up on purpose." Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

The way I see it, there are two types of developers we should take into consideration for this discussion:

• Software Engineers
• Code editors

Most "programmers" these days are really just code editors, they know how to search stack overflow for some useful pointers, copy that code and edit it to what they need. That is absolutely fine, this advances programming in so many ways. But the software engineers are the people that actually answer the stack overflow questions with detailed answers. These engineers have a more advanced skillset in problem solving for specific coding frameworks and languages.

When people say: programmers are cooked, I keep thinking that they mean code editors, not software engineers. Which is a similar trend in basically all industries in relation with AI. Yes, AI has the potential to make some jobs in health care obsolete (e.g. radiologist), but that doesn't mean we no longer need surgeons or domain expert doctors. Same thing applies to programming.

So if you are a developer today, ask yourself the following: Do actually know my stuff well, am I an expert? If the answer is no, and you're basically a code editor (which again, is fine), then you should seriously consider what AI means for your job.

I once asked chatGPT to write a simple RK2 algorithm in python. The function couldve been about 3 lines followed by a return statement. It gave me some convoluted code that was 3 functions and about 20 lines. AI still has some time to go before its can handle writing code on its own. Ive asked copilot/chatGPT several times to write code (just for fun) and it always does this

Other industries... ?

Hey cool, an AI can program itself as well as a human can now. Think of how this will impact the programmer job market! That's got to be like, the biggest implication of this development.