Uncle Bob: It's Over

Source: Hacker News

The Importance of Strong Communication Skills

All you need are strong skills to effectively communicate what you need.

Current Challenges with AI Code Generation

We are not there yet by a long way. I am literally working with Claude right now trying to help it figure out a way to handle permissions effectively. The way it implemented a new action/permission change was a perfect example of code that just about works—until it doesn’t.

Claude is good at writing code, but it’s not always good at writing good code.

The Need for Human Review

What people need to understand about AI is that it’s no better than people in terms of “thought,” only speed. If you tell it to do something, it will do it the way most people would do it, which, in code, is often not very well.

It’s always been possible to hire a bunch of developers, tell them what you want, and get a whole load of buggy crap where every new change seems to break three other things. Claude, left to its own devices, will do exactly that. I’ve seen it happen. The answer is always to go in, read the code it’s written, and tell it to refactor it to be less brittle and more robust.

As long as we are using Claude to write code, we will need to know how to judge the code it produces—just like if you ask it to write your résumé, you need to check the output, or if you get it to produce your accounts.

We will not be writing code the way we used to, but we still need the ability to read what it produces and review it against our experience.

The Reality of Using AI for Programming

And that’s the problem, really. Everyone thinks, “I speak English, so I can get Claude to write me a program.” That’s not true. I speak English, but I couldn’t get Claude to write a doctoral thesis disputing Hawking radiation because I would have absolutely no way of knowing if what it produced was correct.