Chip Huyen: prediction

Transcript context

…No one's thinking about it. It's a problem. We won't have any more in 10, 20 years. There'll be no more engineers because no one's hiring junior engineers. Although I could make the case. Junior engineers, people just getting into computer science right now, are just AI native. And in theory, you could argue they will become really good really fast if they're curious, aren't just delegating, learning and thinking to AI, but learning how to actually, using it to learn how to code well and architect correctly. You could argue they'll be the most successful engineers in the future. I do think that what I mentioned said relating to architect. I think I grouped that in my system thinking. I do think it's very important skill because I think AI can help automate a lot of disjointed skills, but knowing how to utilize the skills together to solve problems is hard. So that's a webinar between Mehran Sahami who is one my favorite professors. He was a chair of the curriculum at the CS Department at Stanford. So he spent a lot of time thinking about CS educations, what should students learn nowadays in the area of AI coding. And then the other person is Andrew Ng, which is of course, is a legend in the AI space. And Mehran Sahami, Professor Sahami, said something very interesting. He said a lot of people think that CS is about coding, but it's not. Coding is just a means to an end. CS is about system thinking, using coding to solve actual problem and problem solving will never go away because what AI can automate more stuff. The problem is just get bigger. But as a process of understanding what caused the issue and how to design step-by-step solution to it, will always be there. So I think an example of, I actually have a lot of issues with AI for in the way of it's debugging. So I'm not sure you use a lot of AI for coding, but something I have noticed and also seen from my friends, it's like it is pretty good when you have very clear, well-defined tasks. Maybe write documentations, fix specific features or build an app from scratch. Doesn't have to interact with a large access in code base, but you added something a little bit more complicated, maybe required interaction with other components and stuff. It's usually not that good. And for example, I was using AI to deploy an applications and it was testing out a new hosting service I was not familiar with. It was like, okay. Usually they inform me, so working AI does give me is confidence to try a new tool. Before what AI is like trying new tools has written, not documentations for the beginning, but I was like, okay, just try it out and learn. So I was testing out this new hosting service and it kept getting a bug, so was very, very annoying. And it was like, okay, I asked [inaudible 00:53:51], fix it. And it kept changing the way, maybe change the environment variable, fix the code, maybe not change from the function to this function, maybe change the language, maybe it doesn't process JavaScript, I don't know, whatever. And it didn't work. And it was like, okay, that's it. I'm just going to read documentation myself and see what's wrong. And it turns out, it's like I'm on another tier, the [inaudible 00:54:16] I want did not, is not available in this tier, right? So I feel like, okay, so the issue with [inaudible 00:54:22] was just trying to focus on fixing things from a different component versus the issue is from a different component. So I think of, okay, be understanding how different components work together and where the source of issue might come from. s from a different component versus the issue is from a different component. So I think of, okay, be understanding how different components work together and where the source of issue might come from. You need to give a holistic view of it. And it's made think is like, okay, how do we teach AI system thinking that I have all the human experts having very much [inaudible 00:54:46] scaffold just like, okay, for this kind of problem, look into this, look into that, look into that, and then stuff. So [inaudible 00:54:53] that could be one way, but that's also made me think is, how do we teach humans, system thinking? Yeah. So yeah, I think it's very interesting skill. I do think it's very important.…

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