From my layperson understanding, the true program is not the lines of code, it’s the model that lives in the programmer’s brain. The code is just an extension of that.
If it needs debugging, it is the mental model that helps. If you need to add a feature, same thing. If a few years go by and no one remembers how the code works, rebuilding that mental model is the first step in making progress.
I suspect that it used to be that if someone contributed good code to the kernel project, it meant that they had a sufficient mental model. But with AI, it can seem like they do.
Maybe if you’re Linus your understanding of the kernel is so strong it would take years to atrophy, if at all. I don’t know. But developers in general?
Too many times in my work life, people have told me one thing, but it turns out that AI invented that and they didn’t really know what they were talking about. On things that I’m an expert in, I can catch it. But if I’m not an expert, I don’t realize the mistake until a consequence occurs.
Allowing AI is basically making it so the maintainers have to be complete experts in everything they accept. Maybe that was already the case, but that is my layperson understanding of it.
From my layperson understanding, the true program is not the lines of code, it’s the model that lives in the programmer’s brain. The code is just an extension of that.
If it needs debugging, it is the mental model that helps. If you need to add a feature, same thing. If a few years go by and no one remembers how the code works, rebuilding that mental model is the first step in making progress.
I suspect that it used to be that if someone contributed good code to the kernel project, it meant that they had a sufficient mental model. But with AI, it can seem like they do.
Maybe if you’re Linus your understanding of the kernel is so strong it would take years to atrophy, if at all. I don’t know. But developers in general?
Too many times in my work life, people have told me one thing, but it turns out that AI invented that and they didn’t really know what they were talking about. On things that I’m an expert in, I can catch it. But if I’m not an expert, I don’t realize the mistake until a consequence occurs.
Allowing AI is basically making it so the maintainers have to be complete experts in everything they accept. Maybe that was already the case, but that is my layperson understanding of it.