How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler(youtube.com)
youtube.com
How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQmI4XKTa0U
3 comments
Fowler makes a good point in this talk: AI changes how engineers work, not the need for engineering itself. The routine parts get easier, but understanding systems, domain logic, and long-term design still comes down to humans. Curious to see how teams adapt as these tools become normal.
He also highlighted an interesting take on vibe-coding:
> And the other thing of course that's the difference and this is the the heart of the article that Unmesh wrote that we published yesterday is when you're using vibe coding in this kind of way, you're actually removing a very important part of of something which is the learning loop. If you're not looking at the output, you're not learning. And the thing is that so much of what we do is we come up with ideas, we try them out on the computer with this constant back and forth between what the computer does with what we're thinking.
> We're constantly going through that learning loop program approach and Unmesh's point, which I think is absolutely true, is you cannot shortcut that process. And what LLM do, they just kind of skim over all of that and you're not learning. And when you're not learning, that means that when you produce something, you don't know how to tweak it and modify it and evolve it and grow it. All you can do is nuke it from orbit and start again.
> And the other thing of course that's the difference and this is the the heart of the article that Unmesh wrote that we published yesterday is when you're using vibe coding in this kind of way, you're actually removing a very important part of of something which is the learning loop. If you're not looking at the output, you're not learning. And the thing is that so much of what we do is we come up with ideas, we try them out on the computer with this constant back and forth between what the computer does with what we're thinking.
> We're constantly going through that learning loop program approach and Unmesh's point, which I think is absolutely true, is you cannot shortcut that process. And what LLM do, they just kind of skim over all of that and you're not learning. And when you're not learning, that means that when you produce something, you don't know how to tweak it and modify it and evolve it and grow it. All you can do is nuke it from orbit and start again.
I believe this is the article by Unmesh that he was referring to (sparked a lot of discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45841056