Future of programming

`1:35:17`

can you just explain it to me and now I know the thing. So at the end of the day of me working with AI all day long, I'm a little bit smarter. Like 5%, sorry, not 5%, half a percent maybe. That compounds over time. But what I've also seen, when I worked on the Omakub project and I tried to let AI drive for me, I felt I was maybe half a percent dumber at the end of the day. — Okay, you said a lot of interesting things. First of all, let's just start at the very fact that asking dumb questions. If you go to Stack Overflow and ask a dumb question or read somebody else's dumb question and the answer to it, there's a lot of judgment there. AI sometimes to an excessive degree has no judgment. It usually says, oh, that's a great question. — [DHH] To a fault. — Yeah, oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, I mean, it's so conducive to learning. It's such a wonderful tool of learning and I too would miss it. And it's a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances

`1:36:18`

of a particular programming language, especially if you don't know it that well or like APIs you can load in documentation. It's just so great for learning. I, for me personally... I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. I don't know what that is exactly. Part of that is the, I'm really sorry. Stack Overflow is an incredible website, but there is a negativity there. There's a judgment there. It's just exciting to be out like with a hype man next to me, just like saying, yeah, that's a great idea. And I'll say, no, that's wrong. I'll correct the AI, and the AI will say, "You're absolutely right. How did I not think about that?" You know, rewrite the code. I'm like, holy shit, I'm having, that's like a buddy. That's like really being positive and is very smart and is challenging me to think. And even if I never use the code it generates, I'm already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is for some reason

`1:37:20`

I'm having more fun. That's a really, really important thing. — I like to think of it as a pair programmer for exactly that reason. Pair programming came a vogue in like the 2000s. Where you'd have two programmers in front of one machine and you'd push the keyboard between you. One programmer would be driving, they'd be typing in. The other programmer would essentially sit and watch the code, suggest improvements, look something up. That was a really interesting dynamic. Now unfortunately, I'm an introvert, so I can do that for about five minutes before I want to jump off a bridge. So it doesn't work for me as a full-time occupation. But AI allows me to have all the best of that experience all the time. Now I think what's really interesting, what you said about it makes it more fun. I hadn't actually thought about that, but what it's made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time. Now I had to do the detour where I let it write all the code for me and I realized I wasn't learning nearly as much as I hoped I would

`1:38:21`

and that I started doing once I typed it out myself. But it gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself, I haven't done that in probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I never really built anything for real. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI and I could have something in the app store by the end of the week. I would not have that confidence unless I had a pair of programming body like AI. I don't actually use it very much for Ruby code. I'm occasionally impressed whenever I try it, they're like, oh, it got this one thing right. That is truly remarkable and it's actually pretty good. And then I'll ask you two more questions and I go like, oh yeah, okay. If you were my junior programmer, I'd start tapping my fingers and going like, you gotta shape up. Now the great thing of course is we can just wait five minutes. The Anthropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is gonna be written by AI. I am more than a little bit skeptical about that, but I'm open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially

`1:39:22`

will turn into a horse when done manually. Something we do recreationally is no longer a mode of transportation to get around LA. You're not gonna saddle up and go to the grocery store and pick up stuff from whole foods in your saddlebacks. That's just not a thing anymore. That could be the future for programming, for manual programming entirely possible. I also don't care. Like even though we have great renditions of all the best songs, as I said, there are millions of people who love to play the guitar. It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak. Now I understand the paradox, when the price of something goes down, actually the overall usage goes up and total spend on that activity goes up. That could also happen maybe. But what we're seeing right now is that a lot of the big shops, a lot of the big companies are not hiring like they were five years ago. They're not anticipating they're gonna need tons more programmers.