Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…To a fault. Yeah. Oh, that’s wonderful. Yeah. I mean, it’s so conducive to learning. It’s such a wonderful tool for learning and I too would miss it. It’s a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances of a particular programming language, especially if you don’t know it that well. Or APIs you can load in documentation, it’s just so great for learning. For me personally, I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. I don’t know what that is exactly. Part of that is the … I’m really sorry, Stack Overflow is an incredible website but there is a negativity there. There’s a judgment there. It’s just exciting to be with a hype man next to me just saying, yeah, that’s a great idea. I’ll say, no, that’s wrong, I’ll correct the AI. The AI will say, you’re absolutely right, how did I not think about that? You’re ready to go. I’m like, holy shit, I’m having, it’s like a buddy that’s really being positive and is very smart and is challenging me to think. And even if I never use the code it generates, I’m already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is, for some reason I’m having more fun. That’s a really, really important thing. I like to think of it as a pair programmer for exactly that reason. Pair programming came vogue in the 2000s, where you’d have two programmers in front of one machine and you’d push the keyboard between you. One programmer would be driving, they’d be typing in. The other programmer would essentially sit and watch the code, suggest improvements, look something up. That was a really interesting dynamic. Now unfortunately, I’m an introvert, so I can do that for about five minutes before I want to jump off a bridge. So it doesn’t work for me as a full-time occupation, but AI allows me to have all the best of that experience all the time. Now, I think what’s really interesting what we said about, it makes it more fun. I hadn’t actually thought about that, but what it’s made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time. Now, I had to do the detour where I let it write all the code for me, and I realized I wasn’t learning nearly as much as I hoped I would. That I started doing once I typed it out myself. But it gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself … I haven’t done that in, probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I never really built anything for real. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI and I could have something in the app store by the end of the week. I would not have that confidence unless I had a pair programming body like AI. I don’t actually use it very much for Ruby code. I’m occasionally impressed whenever I try it, like, oh, it got this one thing right, that is truly remarkable and it’s actually pretty good. And then I’ll ask two more questions and I go like, oh yeah, okay, if you were my junior programmer I’d start tapping my fingers and going like, you’ve got to shape up. Now, the great thing of course is, we can just wait five minutes. The Anthropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is going to be written by AI. I’m more than a little bit skeptical about that, but I’m open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially will turn into a horse when done manually. Something we do recreationally is no longer a mode of transportation to get around LA. You’re not going to saddle up and go to the grocery store and pick up stuff from Whole Foods in your saddlebags. That’s just not a thing anymore. That could be the future for programming, for manual programming, entirely possible. I also don’t care. Even though we have great renditions of all the best songs, as I said, there are millions of people who love to play the guitar. It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I’m quite convinced is true, that we perhaps have seen the peak.…

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