Gabe Newell thinks AI tools will result in a 'funny situation' where people who don't know how to program become 'more effective developers of value' than those who've been at it for a decade
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Talk about cherry picking in order to create a clickbait headline:
That’s the question put to Newell by Saliev: should younger folk looking at this field be learning the technical side, or focusing purely on the best way to use the tools?
“I think it’s both,” says Newell. “I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them, but I think we’ll be in this funny situation where people who don’t know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who’ve been programming, y’know, for a decade.”
Newell goes on to emphasise that this isn’t either/or, and any user should be able to get something helpful from AI. It’s just that, if you really want to get the best out of this technology, you’ll need some understanding of what underlies them.
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Talk about cherry picking in order to create a clickbait headline:
That’s the question put to Newell by Saliev: should younger folk looking at this field be learning the technical side, or focusing purely on the best way to use the tools?
“I think it’s both,” says Newell. “I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them, but I think we’ll be in this funny situation where people who don’t know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who’ve been programming, y’know, for a decade.”
Newell goes on to emphasise that this isn’t either/or, and any user should be able to get something helpful from AI. It’s just that, if you really want to get the best out of this technology, you’ll need some understanding of what underlies them.
Like knowing how to use the bucket/fill tool compared to drawing in the fields manually, I can totally see how getting some automation to do scaffolding, as he calls it, will speed up certain programming jobs.
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There are so many time-saving things that can be done with a little bit of scripting. It’s one reason why excel is so abused. Now that the bar to real scripting is dropping significantly, and we’ll see more and more people solving their own small problems rather than relying on others or suffering through repetitive work. Good stuff.
It doesn’t mean that they are ready to design, build and maintain reliable software or services…
We’ll see more APIs and libraries being used directly by end users, though.
AI agents are a counter-force to this, letting LLMs interact directly with APIs, meaning users don’t have to even touch code.
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And when buggy/vulnerable software allows bad actors to decimate entire companies, I’ll demand double the salary, lol
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There are so many time-saving things that can be done with a little bit of scripting. It’s one reason why excel is so abused. Now that the bar to real scripting is dropping significantly, and we’ll see more and more people solving their own small problems rather than relying on others or suffering through repetitive work. Good stuff.
It doesn’t mean that they are ready to design, build and maintain reliable software or services…
We’ll see more APIs and libraries being used directly by end users, though.
AI agents are a counter-force to this, letting LLMs interact directly with APIs, meaning users don’t have to even touch code.
Yup! How many modern programmers actually know how to do assembly? Could actually program a complex program only in machine code
All of the tools and abstractions we build allow people to be productive at the cost of efficiency. The next generation of tooling will be no different
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Yup! How many modern programmers actually know how to do assembly? Could actually program a complex program only in machine code
All of the tools and abstractions we build allow people to be productive at the cost of efficiency. The next generation of tooling will be no different
Fuck, I remember my assembly language class. I describe it less as “passing” the class and more as “surviving” the class.
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And when buggy/vulnerable software allows bad actors to decimate entire companies, I’ll demand double the salary, lol
They’ll pay triple so ask for quadruple
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In my old consulting days I got a lot of referrals from startups who had gone down the rabbithole making ‘cross-platform’ mobile apps. They had all gone as far as they could, then hit a brick wall with performance or lack of technical support. The solution always came down to taking the hit and rewriting it properly, or trudging onward.
Getting a lot of the same vibe with this ‘casual AI coder’ hype. Best of luck.
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It’s the next stage of corporate capitalism. It’s actually been underway for the past 20-30 years. We’ve seen the rise of the class of corporate overlords, none of whom could actually do the jobs beneath them, and add value of dubious quantity and quality. They take their MBAs and leveraged debt, and hack and chop, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunctional broken companies behind them.
AI is just the next phase of this, and is going to be an economic destroyer, not value creator. Nobody seems to care that it can’t actually really do much useful, let alone replace people in their jobs. This seems completely lost to all of these corporate dweebs though, because again, none of them could actually do any of the jobs beneath them when the chips fall.
What AI could maybe replace though, is the executive lair of most companies. It’s not like neither add any fucking value, actually having AI in an executive role would probably lead to value creation, as everyone else could just largely ignore it unless it was useful.
What a world we live in.
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Talk about cherry picking in order to create a clickbait headline:
That’s the question put to Newell by Saliev: should younger folk looking at this field be learning the technical side, or focusing purely on the best way to use the tools?
“I think it’s both,” says Newell. “I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them, but I think we’ll be in this funny situation where people who don’t know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who’ve been programming, y’know, for a decade.”
Newell goes on to emphasise that this isn’t either/or, and any user should be able to get something helpful from AI. It’s just that, if you really want to get the best out of this technology, you’ll need some understanding of what underlies them.
Billionaires can shove it. You do NOT need to use stolen assets for your work.
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It’s the next stage of corporate capitalism. It’s actually been underway for the past 20-30 years. We’ve seen the rise of the class of corporate overlords, none of whom could actually do the jobs beneath them, and add value of dubious quantity and quality. They take their MBAs and leveraged debt, and hack and chop, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunctional broken companies behind them.
AI is just the next phase of this, and is going to be an economic destroyer, not value creator. Nobody seems to care that it can’t actually really do much useful, let alone replace people in their jobs. This seems completely lost to all of these corporate dweebs though, because again, none of them could actually do any of the jobs beneath them when the chips fall.
What AI could maybe replace though, is the executive lair of most companies. It’s not like neither add any fucking value, actually having AI in an executive role would probably lead to value creation, as everyone else could just largely ignore it unless it was useful.
What a world we live in.
I conclude from this, that any exec who mass-layoffs because of AI, could in turn be easily replaced with AI.
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It’s the next stage of corporate capitalism. It’s actually been underway for the past 20-30 years. We’ve seen the rise of the class of corporate overlords, none of whom could actually do the jobs beneath them, and add value of dubious quantity and quality. They take their MBAs and leveraged debt, and hack and chop, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunctional broken companies behind them.
AI is just the next phase of this, and is going to be an economic destroyer, not value creator. Nobody seems to care that it can’t actually really do much useful, let alone replace people in their jobs. This seems completely lost to all of these corporate dweebs though, because again, none of them could actually do any of the jobs beneath them when the chips fall.
What AI could maybe replace though, is the executive lair of most companies. It’s not like neither add any fucking value, actually having AI in an executive role would probably lead to value creation, as everyone else could just largely ignore it unless it was useful.
What a world we live in.
I think you’ve hit the nail straight on here. The fact that they can’t do the jobs underneath them because there is a complete disconnect of management to workers because no one works from the ground up anymore.
