Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…No one is of this generation, but maybe that’s a skill. Maybe if you get on the same page as the AI, because there’s a consistency to the AI. It’s like it really is a pair of programmers with a consistent style and structure and so on. Plus, with your own prompting, you can control the kind of code you write. I mean, it could legitimately be a skill. That’s the dream of the prompt engineer. I think it’s complete pipe dream. I don’t think editors exist that aren’t good at writing. I’ve written a number of books. I’ve had a number of professional editors. Not all of them wrote their own great books, but all of them were great writers in some regard. You cannot give someone pointers if you don’t know how to do it. It’s very difficult for an editor to be able to spot what’s wrong with a problem if the data couldn’t make the solution themselves. The capacity to be a good editor is the reward you get from being a good doer. You have to be a doer first. Now, that’s not the same as saying that vibe coding, prompt engineering won’t be able to produce fully formed amazing systems even shortly. I think that’s entirely possible, but then there’s no skill left, which maybe is the greatest payoff at all. Wasn’t that the whole promise of AI anyway, that it was just all natural language that even my clumsy way of formulating a question could result in a beautiful succinct answer? That actually to me is a much more appealing vision that there’s going to be these special prompt engineering wizards who know how to tickle the AI just right to produce what they want. The beauty of AI is to think that someone who doesn’t know the first thing about how AI actually works is able to formulate their idea and their aspirations for what they want, and the AI could somehow take that messy clump of ideas and produce something that someone wants. That’s actually what programming has always been. There’s very often been people who didn’t know how to program, who wanted programs, who then hired programmers, who gave them messy descriptions of what they wanted, and then when the programmers delivered that back said, “Oh, no, actually that’s not what I meant. I want else.” AI may be able to provide that cycle if that happens to the fullest extent of it, yeah, there’s not going to be as many programmers around, but hopefully presumably someone still, at least for the foreseeable future, have to understand whether what the AI is producing actually works or not. As an interesting case study, maybe a thought experiment, if I wanted to vibe code Basecamp or hey, some of the products you’ve built, what would be the bottlenecks? Where would I fail along the way?…

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