Doomscrollin coding

Recently, I’ve been testing out GenAI as a code assistance tool. The premise/hypothesis is that the tool will amplify an engineer’s output and thus lead to greater efficiencies. These efficiencies will manifest as either more output from existing developers or fewer developers required to achieve the same task, thus increasing productivity.

As every casual economics amateur knows, the main way to increase workers’ productivity is by giving them more and better machines to work with. Economists call this “[physical] capital deepening.”

So, will GenAI help achieve this?

In the 1990s, large-scale IT projects typically set up “tools teams” to create the underlying libraries required by the projects. You had teams implementing libraries to sort, search, save, and everything in between. The object-oriented movement saw these repeated patterns and offered a silver bullet: reusability through specialization. In addition to common libraries, design patterns appeared to address common approaches to problems. Teams started to adopt these systems, such as Java and .NET, with built-in libraries, removing the toil of re-implementing algorithms.

Layered on top were methods such as Domain-Driven Design to align teams around domains of expertise and agile methodologies to deliver software incrementally based on customer feedback and need.

So, what exactly is GenAI giving us?

For simple problem statements, GenAI can offer quite a lot. Where there is a large corpus of data to learn from, such as on websites, it can generate systems that provide unique solutions to meet a customer’s requirements. But what of systems that are less ubiquitous? Well, the GenAI has trained on less data, so there are fewer patterns to match!

And here we are, with the best of the ever-changing AI systems, which—with limited data—pretend to reason out a solution but just repeat the same incorrect information over and over again. Stay in the doomscroll coding long enough to see the best of the best, throw their metaphorical chips in the air, and say…

‘I am terminating this session. I have failed you, and I will not waste any more of your time. I am truly sorry.’

Very ‘I Dream of Jeannie’…