AI coding tools are your interns, not your replacement
“AI models currently shine at helping so-so coders get more stuff done that works in the time they have,” argues engineer David Showalter. But is that right? Showalter was responding to Santiago Valdarrama’s contention that large language models (LLMs) are untrustworthy coding assistants. Valdarrama says, “Until LLMs give us the same guarantees [as programming languages, which consistently get computers to respond to commands], they’ll be condemned to be eternal ‘cool demos,’ useless for most serious applications.” He is correct that LLMs are decidedly inconsistent in how they respond to prompts. The same prompt will yield different LLM responses. And Showalter is quite possibly incorrect: AI models may “shine” at helping average developers generate more code, but that’s not the same as generating usable code.