My 2021 AI Coding Thoughts Revisited

In February 2021, I wrote Robotic Pair Programmers, which is my description of what I would want out of an AI coding assistant. I am pretty sure I was unaware of any “good” AI coding assistants, but a month later I took a look at Kite, which was an early attempt. I think there must have been something in the air. Copilot was released that June. ChatGPT would be released the next year. It is now more than five years later, and we’re Approaching Infinity, where the doublings of computing are on a much larger base. We are past the bend in the exponential curve. But, still, there might be things that are constant (or at least aren’t immediately obsolete) in the three doublings we had since I wrote it. The main thing I got wrong is that I thought the main way to use AI would be as a pair programmer, which was true for the first iteration. Now, it’s more as an independent co-worker that you manage. I still do a lot of pair programming with AI, but this won’t be true in the industry five…