Yes, sometimes people who barrel forward can create a mess, and there are places where careful deliberation and planning really pay off, but in most cases, my observation has been that the "do-ers" produce a lot of good work, letting the structure of the problem space reveal itself as they go along and adapting as needed, without getting hung up on academic purity or aesthetically perfect code; in contrast, some others can fall into pathological over-thinking and over-planning, slowing down the team with nitpicks that don't ultimately matter, demanding to know what your contingencies are for x y z and w without accepting "I'll figure it out when or if any of those actually happen" - meanwhile their own output is much slower, and while it may be more likely to work according to their own plan the first time without bugs, it wasn't worth the extra time compared to the first approach. It's premature optimization but applied to the whole development process instead of just a piece of code.

I think the over-thinkers are more prone to shun AI because they can't be sure that every line of code was done exactly how they would do it, and they see (perhaps an unwarranted) value in everything being structured according to a perfect human-approved plan and within their full understanding; I do plan out the important parts of my architecture to a degree before starting, and that's a large part of my job as a lead/architect, but overall I find the most value in the do-er approach I described, which AI is fantastic at helping iterate on. I don't feel like I'm committing some philosophical sin when it makes some module as a blackbox and it works without me carefully combing through it - the important part is that it works without blowing up resource usage and I can move on to the next thing.

The way the interviewed person described fast iteration with feedback has always been how I learned best - I had a lot of fun and foundational learning playing with the (then-brand-new) HTML5 stuff like making games on canvas elements and using 3D rendering libraries. And this results in a lot of learning by osmosis, and I can confirm that's also the case using AI to iterate on something you're unfamiliar with - shaders in my example very recently. Starting off with a fully working shader that did most of the cool things I wanted it to do, generated by a prompt, was super cool and motivating to me - and then as I iterated on it and incorporated different things into it, with or without the AI, I learned a lot about shaders.

Overall, I don't think the author's appraisal is entirely wrong, but the result isn't necessarily a bad thing - motivation to accomplish things has always been the most important factor, and now other factors are somewhat diminished while the motivation factor is amplified. Intelligence and expertise can't be discounted, but the important of front-loading them can easily be overstated.

Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention.

https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

This happens even to human artists who aren't trying to plagiarize - for example, guitarists often come up with a riff that turns out to be very close to one they heard years ago, even if it feels original to them in the moment.

I've been coding for over a decade, and I've built some great things, but the slow, careful, painstaking drudge-work parts were always the biggest motivation-killers. AI is worth it at any cost for removing the friction from these parts the way it has for me. Days of work are compressed into 20 minutes sometimes (e.g. convert a huge file of Mercurial hooks into Git hooks, knowing only a little about Mercurial hooks and none about Git hooks re: technical implementation). Donkey-work that would serve no value wasting my human time and energy on when a machine can do it, because it learned from decades of examples from the before-times when people did this by hand. If some people abuse the tools to make a morg here and there, so be it; it's infinitely worth the tradeoff.

I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.

> Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miracle

    2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. "The bridge is a miracle of engineering."