Masad’s comments have come up before and sparked huge outrage before and just like before people are missing the hugely important context here.
He added that coding may become obsolete, but people will still need to continue to work on their fundamentals: “I’m at this point, like agents pilled. I’m very bullish. Like, I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago. I would say kind of learn a bit of coding. I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, right? Learn how to communicate clearly, with as you would with humans, but also with machines.”
The way I see it, he’s thinking that the current-day approach to coding is likely to go the same way that coding in assembly language went when high-level languages and compilers became good and common. The vast majority of programmers never need to think about individual registers or the specific sequence of opcodes needed to perform operations or access memory, the compilers handle that and they do a great job. Only a handful of specialists really need to go down to the metal like that any more.
So too will it be for a lot of the programming that current day programmers do. It’ll still be useful to know how it works so that you’ll know what to ask for and what to do when something goes wrong, but 99% of the code will be done by AIs and will hardly even be looked at by a human. There’ll still be people who are experts at working with programs but the current approach to how that’s done is likely to be obsolete.
Masad’s comments have come up before and sparked huge outrage before and just like before people are missing the hugely important context here.
The way I see it, he’s thinking that the current-day approach to coding is likely to go the same way that coding in assembly language went when high-level languages and compilers became good and common. The vast majority of programmers never need to think about individual registers or the specific sequence of opcodes needed to perform operations or access memory, the compilers handle that and they do a great job. Only a handful of specialists really need to go down to the metal like that any more.
So too will it be for a lot of the programming that current day programmers do. It’ll still be useful to know how it works so that you’ll know what to ask for and what to do when something goes wrong, but 99% of the code will be done by AIs and will hardly even be looked at by a human. There’ll still be people who are experts at working with programs but the current approach to how that’s done is likely to be obsolete.