This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).

Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems

With the difference that intelli* is usually correct - i.e. it fetches all the possible methods from actual code, and you can see the related api docs. It’s another view for the same data (more or less - of course there can be docs other than api docs)

With AI you’ve got no idea whether something is right, it’s a probablistic thing

That’s why I don’t buy the “AI as just another abstraction layer” argument. AI is something different and we should use it differently.

I think Copilot (and all other AI coding variant) is different from auto-complete. Auto-complete just give you function names, variable names, but AI coding can write whole block or even file of code, if you so wish.

By the same principle, I also think advancement in AI is different from other technological advancement. Even the invention of computer is at most on par with AI if AI is able to walk far. People always try to use the train-horse analogue but I think we will see a gloom future in the next 5-10 years -- especially when the whole world is not turning to the left, but to the right.

Now that US and China and everyone else are competing on AI, that future might come earlier than I thought.

I do read the docs a lot less now though with IntelliSense, so if my craft were reading and understanding docs I'd probably be measurably disappointed by this future.

I think there's a fundamental difference.

Autocomplete and intellisense are tools first and foremost. AI is centralized into a handful of companies you are forced to pay every month for.

Autocomplete and intellisense don't care about your data. There's an inherent issue with data, privacy and ownership when it comes to AI.

If we can run useful models locally and make it generally available on consumer hardware... things would be different.