I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.
Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But
None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.
If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).
We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.
Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.
Just to add to this, people say the same about eg citizen Kane being such a classic but without the context of it having genre defining firsts, the film doesn’t stand out as much to a modern viewer.
For those unaware, this is a very interesting guy, because he stumbled on (creating, through his business Medal) a valuable AI dataset that - by offering to buy his company - reportedly OpenAI offered him 500M for. The dataset, I understand, is first person game video plus controller actions.
He then realized the value, which is in short a way to teach models real world and gui operation common sense. He can train a model to predict, from video, what a controller would have to do.
This is expected to lead in breakthroughs in robotics, gui controlling, self driving, and more.
He responded by learning deep learning, and starting a new company, general intuition.
I respect this guy a lot for teaching js this.
Absolutely fascinating and I take his opinion seriously.
He's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material.
More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or they don't.
This is a tangent, because it clearly didn’t pan out, but I had hope for rust having an edge when I learned about how all objects are known to be immutable or not. This means all the mutable objects can be held together, as well as the immutable, and we’d have more efficient use of the cache: memory writes to mutable objects share the cache with other mutable objects, not immutable
Objects, and the bandwidth isn’t wasted on writing back bytes of immutable objects that will never change.
As I don’t see any reason rust would be limited in runtime execution compared to c, I was hoping for this proving an edge.
I think it would be quite difficult to actually arrange the memory layout to take advantage of this in a useful way. Mutable/immutable is very context-dependent in rust.
Rust doesn't have immutable memory, only access restrictions. An exclusive owner of an object can always mutate it, or can lend temporary read-only access to it. So the same memory may flip between exclusive-write and shared-read back and forth.
It's an interesting optimization, but not something that could be done directly.
I played a Legends MUD game on a BBS, could that be it? I’ve looked for it for years on and off and finally found it recently. With text files, and Even the executables and database to run it.
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