Thomas Dohmke’s Post

Without AI, anyone can be a coder as well

10 years ago - anyone can become a coder with NO-code 5 years ago - anyone can become a coder with LOW-code Today - anyone can become a coder with AI Developers will stay forever. The knowledge/skills that those tools bring are anyway commoditized. Complex logic is creativity and this is driven by human brain 🧠 and experience optimizing logic ⚙️

AI is a remarkable technological breakthrough, but let's stop misleading people into thinking it can magically turn them into engineers. I understand that this push is primarily to satisfy higher management and shareholders by boosting sales of products like Copilot (which I also use). However, these discussions often omit the reality that you cannot build a complete system with these tools. You can't create something like Netflix using these tools alone. There is no magic prompt you can write that will accomplish that. You were right to use LEGO as an example because software systems are indeed like LEGO. They are built piece by piece, and each piece involves many hours of design, careful consideration, and numerous discussions among various stakeholders to achieve even a basic MVP. Then you continue building, requirements change, technologies evolve, and issues arise daily. Let's stop this cheap marketing and, for the sake of future engineers, start presenting things as they truly are.

Having written possibly one of the most complex cyber security products ever built, I can tell you with a reasonably high degree of confidence that to me it seems unlikely that AI will be able to match the combination of sheer human intelligence and ingenuity that goes into understanding difficult problems and building innovative products (that are usually quite sophisticated), especially ones where there is ZERO room for error. Also, speaking of GitHub, personally I've never quite understood how someone could take any non-public domain code (i.e. their secret-sauce) and simply store it on someone else's computers (i.e. in the Cloud.) 😉 That's akin to the U.S. Govt. taking all their NATIONAL SECURITY secrets and storing them onto someone else's computers! (Oh wait, they already do that! Gee whiz, what on Earth were they thinking?! Maybe the U.S. Govt. aren't the best example (anymore) of how to protect secrets.) When you store stuff in the Cloud, you're MERELY storing stuff on a bunch of computers OWNED and OPERATED by SOMEONE ELSE, who thus has ADMINISTRATIVE ACCESS on those computers, which means THEY can ACCESS whatever YOU store on their computers (, which is WHY we do NOT store ANYTHING at ALL in the Cloud.) Just my 2c.

Yeah, but a bad developer 😇 Nice to say at a fundraising, not to developers. Cmon, at the end it s a SUPERFAST copy-paste from git. It helps on documention, unit testing, devops and plumbing tasks like that, that s true. Good for junior devs to learn, good for a senior to speed up developing. Full stop. Serious code and real world software is waaaayyyyy ahead of it, for the moment. I m using the PAID version from day1 and I love it, but, please, be a serious guy.

This is mind-blowing! The potential of AI-powered development, like GitHub Copilot Workspace, to democratize software creation is incredible. Can't wait to see your TED Talk and the live demo! #AI #DeveloperDemocratization #GitHubCopilot

It's unlikely that there will be a billion developers or that everyone will be able to start developing complex code easily. While AI can facilitate experimentation with small pieces of code, allowing many to achieve success in simpler tasks, building enterprise-level software for production deployment requires much more. It requires systems thinking, architectural expertise, and the ability to integrate various components and external systems. These skills involve a deep understanding of design principles, scalability, and security, which AI alone cannot replace. The need for experienced architects and system integrators will remain crucial for creating robust, reliable, and scalable enterprise solutions. You are possibly calling people with such skills as developers. Good talk and thanks for sharing!

....but not a very good one.

Try to build a complex car with Lego without the instructions and after we can talk

I wanted the AI to make me a JS function to tell me the coordinates of an intescection between 2 lines, it took 10 tries for it to even output anything close, then another few to make something that was fixable, that was the best outcome ive had with AI and i only ever asked for a simple function with clear parameters, im sorry but no, its not just AI, you still need the same knowledge and understanding, the difference is now you can write more bad code faster if you have no knowledge of how everything works in what you are doing