The Tragedy of AI Coding - The Atlantic
AI-assisted software development could have liberated programmers. Instead, it has become the latest way for Big Tech to confine us. My family and I enjoy the occasional meal of delicious slow-cooked meat, but every time we visit a barbecue joint, we can’t remember whether we like the beans and slaw on offer. Some beans are sweet; others are spicy. Some slaw is vinegar based; others creamy. We should keep track of this somehow, we always say but then never bother. I should make an app, I used to joke. But that was a ridiculous idea. Thanks to generative artificial intelligence, it became less ridiculous. By last summer, I had been making small programs with AI for some time. AI’s adeptness at programming was helping me, a busy person with a professional programming background but limited reason to program, work creatively with computing for the first time in ages. I wanted to see how far I could push AI as a solo programmer. The barbecue-sides-preference problem, I reasoned, would serv