5 Ways You Code Better Than Any AI
Photo by Markus Spiske @markusspiske on Unsplash
AI is the new hotness in programming. People are running around, panicking and thinking that their jobs are going to be taken over by the machines.
Don’t worry though. Although I wrote an article listing 5 ways AI codes better than you I’m here to give you the fantastic news that there are 5 ways that you are better than any AI.
Creative Problem Solving
Humans can approach completely novel situations and at the minimum work out a potential solution.
Since Generative AI must be fed training data in advance before it can generate a response this isn’t an option.
Your ability to brainstorm, adapt, and innovate on the fly makes you uniquely human. It makes you irreplaceable by AI.
Understanding Context
Even if you run a local Generative AI on your machine that runs through all your files it doesn’t come close to any work colleague. People know the context of you, your work and the expectations for each.
AI is good at spotting patterns, but often misses the wider context. Don’t forget that if a Generative AI doesn’t know something it will often make it up.
In terms of development, it all means that generative AI doesn’t properly obey your coding standards. It means that generative AI doesn’t understand your customers. And AI might make up code that doesn’t work.
Unlike you and your quality code, you lovely human, you.
Communication
Coding isn’t just about hammering out lines of code, it’s about working together to create an end product. That might be a code review, pair programming or even shooting the breeze over a coffee.
When we communicate with other people, we are able to come up with amazing solutions. We wouldn’t have the iPhone without teamwork. We wouldn’t have Tesla without teamwork. We wouldn’t have the wheel without teamwork.
Machines might mimic human communication, but that isn’t the same thing at all. Our cooperation and communication cannot yet be copied let alone replaced by machines.
Intuition
As developers, we have built and broken many systems. We’ve seen our code fail to compile on many occasions. We’ve been fired from a few jobs (might just be me, that last one).
Through each and every experience we build up knowledge that makes up our intuition. We’ve seen it all before, so when we wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea about how to solve a problem we’re more often than not correct. Other times we see potential problems before they even become bugs.
AI might be able to learn from data, but it can’t learn from unwritten experience. It can’t do things to gain that experience. It simply can’t be human.
Ethical Judgments
AI does what we ask it to do, at least within the “guardrails” that the AI owners have implemented.
When we ask it to do something outside these rules it might say that it simply cannot. That’s because Generative AI isn’t making moral decisions, rather it’s simply following basic rules.
It’s great that code generated by AI won’t accidentally start World War III, yet that won’t help if you are writing military code. If you want ethical judgments, you are going to need a human for the foreseeable future.
Here is Why no AI Competes with You
Let us take the idea that AI can learn faster than a human. The truth is a human paired with an AI becomes super-human.
In this study students who had access to an AI code for tasks improved their progression, correctness and decreased their errors and task completion time (when compared to those who didn’t). It didn’t even decrease their performance in subsequent manual coding tasks.
That is, using AI learns better than you do but if you use it to help you learn.
That is true for all of the AI advantages above, instead of trying to compete with the AI, we should use it to become super coders.
I know most programmers know this as 92% of programmers use AI tools already.
Conclusion
AI is great as a tool, but it’s not close to replacing human coders just yet. So, settle down with your coffee and start your work with the understanding that your job is safe.
For now…