Taking AI Seriously

Over the years I’ve read many blog posts from programmers giving advice on how to integrate (or make peace with) AI in software engineering. And, more often than not, the advice is written with the implicit assumption that the technology will stay where it was at the time of writing. So if you lay them out on a timeline, it might be: “Tab completion is useful, but you need a human to have repository-wide context.” “Coding agents are useful, but produce a lot of slop, you need to review and aggressively refactor their code.” “Coding agents are very useful, but you still need to review the code.” “Code was never the hard part. Actually the hard part is the deep tacit knowledge of talking to the customer.” (You are here) “It is professional malpractice to write code by hand.” “We have a cron job where every morning Claude Requiem one-shots the spec into x86 assembly.” It sounds like the propaganda of a state that is losing a war: the tales of heroic victory get closer and closer to the…

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