Elizabeth Stone: evaluation

Transcript context

…Where do you think engineering goes in, I don't know, five, 10 years? Do you think people need to still understand code? Or do you think there's this abstraction layer that sits on top where you don't even have to learn C++, Java, Python, whatever? I think there's a difference between being able to write lines of code in a particular language, like Python or C++ and understanding how code, computer systems, products work. And I don't think the latter is going away, because if we trusted agents to know all the languages and write all the code, we're not going to know why is something... is it a good product? Is it a bad product? Is it working as we expected when it doesn't? Like I mentioned earlier, we take a lot of risk. We fail fast, we recover fast. That requires an understanding of how are these systems working. I might use an agent to help me understand those things, help me detect an anomaly or something that's broken faster and triage it, but I still need to have a fluency of what is this thing that we're building and how does it work, so I know if it's good and I know how to fix it. I don't know. I hope that doesn't go away, because that's like a, how do we make the world a better place through the stuff that we're building? I think requires some understanding of what we've built. What I'm hearing, which it makes sense, is you may not have to write the code, but you have to understand it and what's happening. But it's so much harder to just... as a person not writing it to actually have that instilled in you.…

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