Has AI Conquered Coding? (It’s Not So Simple…) | AI Reality Check
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Within technology circles, there's a lot of buzz right now about a recent essay written by a professional programmer and entrepreneur named Lars Fay. It opens with the following description of the current state of affairs of AI-driven software development. I'm going to read here. This workflow takes many shapes at this point, but in general, it is a process where someone defines the project's requirements, generates a plan, and then pulls the slot machine lever over and over, iterating and reiterating with often multiple agent instances until it's done, all the while putting a growing distance between the orchestrator and the code that is being generated and committed. Now, this new approach to computer programming has thrown the industry into a frenzy of excitement.
And I really do mean excitement. Let me read you a real quote from an essay that a developer posted just a couple months ago. Now, I'm reading here. What a fantastic time to be alive. With Cloud Code, I have become, if I do say so myself, a 10x developer. Sometimes it feels like 100x. I find it all thrilling and amazing. It's all intoxicating to watch Cloud Code work, to ask it to do something that I know would take a week, or to have it figure out some complex bug that I would have taken three days to debug is almost too much to believe. I don't have the superlatives to describe it. Now, what does that rhetoric remind me of?
Whoa, that's a full rainbow all the way. Double rainbow. Oh, my God. It's a double rainbow all the way. Whoa, that's so intense.
All right, joking aside, this vision points to a massive change for the world of software development. In this new world... No one would need to learn to code again. English will be the new abstraction layer. Just explain what you want and the AI will create it. And as a consequence, millions of well-paid and highly skilled software developers will be replaced by a small number of hyper-caffeinated orchestrators who manage hordes of tireless coding agents. But is this vision accurate? Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI Reality Check episode of this show, which is a good opportunity to take a closer look. And indeed, if we return to Lars Faye's essay, we quickly find that he's not a believer in the idea that we're on the path to a world without code.
If anything... Fay thinks that this new style of software development isn't sustainable, a belief he captures bluntly in the title of his essay, Agentic Coding is a Trap. Now, this seems like an argument that gets at the heart of so many issues about AI and knowledge work and hype and reality. So clearly, we need to take a closer look, and that's exactly what we're going to do. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
So what's Lars Fey's issue with the current vision of agents taking over all coding? I want to read you another quote from his essay. Being successful with this approach to coding agents hinges on a rather crucial element. Only a skilled developer who's thinking critically and comfortable operating at the architectural level can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code before they become a problem. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, It's the individual's critical thinking skills and cognitive clarity that AI tooling has now been proven to impact negatively. As Fay elaborates, this idea that AI is undermining the very skills needed to use AI effectively is not an abstract fear. It's actually happening right now and at wide scale.
And it's something that programmers are really starting to talk a lot about. To support this claim, Fay points to a bunch of posts from Reddit where people are worried about exactly this skill. I want to read you a few headlines and quotes that Fay points out here. Okay, so here's one. The headline is, Losing my ability to code due to AI. And the post goes on to say, I feel like my skills are really deteriorating. I think that inherently not understanding the syntax is a problem in itself.
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