URL: https://whitep4nth3r.com/blog/the-promise-that-wasnt-kept/
AI has always promised to “help people spend more time doing valuable work” by “automating the manual, repetitive, toilsome tasks” so that software developers can be “free to use their time on ‘something better.’” Despite this, the report states that “individuals are reporting a decrease in the amount of time they spend doing valuable work as AI adoption increases”. The maths isn’t mathsing.
Meaning and value in software development is actually created through the impact of building things that makes human lives better, or easier, or slightly less bad.
Value in software development cannot be determined by how many lines of code you can bash out in any working day, and especially whether or not you are using AI to do so. Real value is delivered through vision, creativity, experimentation, and using human brains to solve human-centred problems.
The tools someone uses to build a kitchen are only as good as the skills of the person using them. A skilled craftsperson can probably use any old tool and produce a great result that holds up for years to come.
There’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced; we all have to start from somewhere. But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software. Because for the most part, humans use software.
Andreas Møller said it better in They lied to you. Building software is really hard:
The true value of a software engineer is in our ability to analyze problems as well as design and implement creative solutions. To get good at these skills you need to understand not just the tools at your disposal but also the technologies you are building on top of. If you don’t understand how an application works then you have no chance of fixing its bugs and issues.