I feel this myself, but I don't think it means that coding is going away, exactly. Some kinds of coding are less manual, in the same way we don't write in assembler anymore. But there will always be a place for code.

Lately I've been feeling like AI replaces software libraries more than it replaces mainline code. In the old days, if you needed a function, you would find a library that did it for you. Now you might ask AI to write the function - and it's likely a better fit than a library would have been.

I don't know what this means for code improvements over time. People tend libraries; they upgrade their code. AI doesn't make similar improvements - or at least, it's not clear that it does. And it's not obvious to me that AI can keep improving if more and more code out in the world is already AI-generated. Does the way we code stagnate?

Anyway, the other day I asked ChatGPT to break down how a function worked in a language I don't code in, and it was incredibly useful. There's no doubt in my mind that it speeds us up at the very least. And maybe manual coding will be relegated to building blocks and fundamentals. #AI