AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught – IEEE Spectrum

Recently at lunch with a couple of very long standing technology folks, one a engineering manager with many many years of experience the topic of the impact of generative AI coding tools and junior developers came up.

I’ve written a little about how I am using these technologies extensively, in really valuable ways, but one of the things I’ve learned is the 40 years of experience as a developer, the intuitions I’ve developed over that time are indispensable. I spot poor patterns, potential security issues, performance issues that are clearly common in code bases since the and again the technology will revery to them–you have to ride them hard in my experience to use use flex over floats for layout for example.

Can you develop those intuitions without at some point actually writing the code?

My instinct for now is the tools are, for more junior developers, better imagined as teachers than as lackeys.