Programming Is Real Engineering, And AI Proves It

Jeremy Bowers: “Those of us who live in the programming world can end up with a very skewed view of the capabilities of AI right now, because in our world, they are incredibly useful in ways that are much more difficult to extend into other domains. … But now what I consider the basic minimum acceptable engineering for any project that goes into source control is substantially more than was even available to me in 1997. … The AIs bang along all our bumpers; failing compiles, failing tests, failing integrations, error messages, all the bumpers we’ve built into our engineering process, and in the end they get a good result. But that good result is as much a result of all the solid engineering processes we have installed as anything else, because the AI without those protections rolls into the gutter relatively quickly.”