This last weekend I was traveling out of town for a wedding. On Monday before my flight out I had some extra time, and with my old university campus on the way to the airport anyway I decided to visit.

It was nice just walking around in “free roam” mode with no objectives. There’s plenty that’s changed in the short two years since I’ve graduated, but plenty more that was still the same.

My favorite part was popping into my old campus job office and saying hi. I didn’t recognize anyone but my old boss, but we had a good few minutes catching up. I learned that the Easter egg I hid on the school homepage survived a redesign which was a pleasant surprise!

The topic of AI came up. I graduated at the interesting time when ChatGPT had just gone mainstream and everyone was still only starting to figure out what they could use it for. Today it sounds like the development team at my old job is integrating LLMs into quite a lot that they do. I’d say I’m pretty firmly in the AI critic camp, but I’m thinking that’s not a terrible idea.

There’s a lot wrong on the business side of generative AI that I could and won’t get into, but as a technology I don’t think it’s going away. It can be a decent tool but you have to learn when and how it’s appropriate to use. I find it’s really not bad for prototyping and as a supplement to human-written docs. I think it will be a very long time before generative AI is able to make any positive and meaningful changes to a mature codebase, and it’s very likely it will never reach that point at all.

Because here’s the thing. Writing code is not the hard part of software development. By the time you’ve clearly defined what it is you need to do, actually writing the code is the easy part. It’s not any huge secret, but it can be easy to forget in all the AI hype.

And I think learning that lesson in a fairly low-stakes environment like school is a great place to do it. I’ve seen at my current job the occasional heavy reliance on generative AI and it’s always a hindrance when used thoughtlessly. Learning to avoid that early in a career sounds like a good idea to me.

— JP