On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 11:40:30AM -0500, Pierre-Elliott B??cue wrote:
> > That's something I find very interesting with AI-assisted software
> > engineering: it puts specification, documentation and testing back at
> > the center of the picture.
>
> It has always been at the center.
It may have been at the center of *your* workflow, and if you're
lucky, your employer's mandated workflow. However, for many
developers, and for many startups, the temptation to "move fast and
break things" is incredibly strong.
To the extent that this incentivized people to create more unit tests
and define interfaces between components (which is generally required
for good unit tests; otherwise you may be forced to create integration
tests, which take a lot longer and burns a lot more CPU time, more
energy, more water, more CO2, etc.)
> I'm also really terrified by the cognitive decline that seems to arise
> with these tools.
I'm worried only if any tool start out being cheap (for example,
$200/month for $2000 worth of AI tokens), and then it suddenly becomes
more expensive, people who started relying on any tools, only to have
them suffer a rug pull, it might be highly problematic.
On the other hand, it's unquestionable that the fact that calculators
are incredibly cheap (a four function calculator runs for maybe $3
USD) has meant that there has been a decline in the ability of people
to do math in their heads.
As another example, compilers have *definitely* resulted in people no
longer as good at writing assembly language. There were some Unix
old-timers on a mailing list recently reminsicing about how way back
when, it was *assumed* that human-written assembly would always be
more better and more efficient than compiler-generated assembly ---
and these days it is pretty much self-evident that compilers do a
better job than what humans can do. Part of this is because how much
more complex modern CPU's have gotten compared to a PDP-11. But I
think it's more about people being less proficient at certain skills
that are no longer as important, and less about some more general
claim about "cognitive decline".
Cheers,
- Ted
