Debugging is as low-level as
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 3:54 am
Finally: Debugging gets tangled up with high-level skills – but that’s not right. it gets, the second thing any programmer learns after writing their first “hello, world.” I’ve seen estimates that generative AI can be as much as 90% accurate when writing code – which sounds pretty good until you realize that 90% accuracy is probably per line of code. For a 10-line function, the probability that the result will be correct goes down to about a third.
So, there will be a lot of debugging to do – and we have canada whatsapp number data to take that into account. It’s surprising to me that more people haven’t noticed the disjunction between “Now we won’t have to worry about understanding the details of programming languages and libraries” (hey, I may have even said that) and “But we’ll have to be able to debug errors in code that we haven’t written and may not understand.” And I’m not sure how you gain the kind of mental fluency you need to do this debugging without having written a lot of code by hand.
There will probably be fewer garden-variety “won’t compile” syntax bugs, but more bugs that alter behavior in subtle ways or introduce security vulnerabilities. When asked to improve a program I wrote, I’ve seen GPT change the order of lines in ways that introduced subtle errors. I’m not saying that AI won’t make programmers faster and more efficient – but I wonder if we’re also throwing junior programmers into the deep end of the pool without a life jacket.
So, there will be a lot of debugging to do – and we have canada whatsapp number data to take that into account. It’s surprising to me that more people haven’t noticed the disjunction between “Now we won’t have to worry about understanding the details of programming languages and libraries” (hey, I may have even said that) and “But we’ll have to be able to debug errors in code that we haven’t written and may not understand.” And I’m not sure how you gain the kind of mental fluency you need to do this debugging without having written a lot of code by hand.
There will probably be fewer garden-variety “won’t compile” syntax bugs, but more bugs that alter behavior in subtle ways or introduce security vulnerabilities. When asked to improve a program I wrote, I’ve seen GPT change the order of lines in ways that introduced subtle errors. I’m not saying that AI won’t make programmers faster and more efficient – but I wonder if we’re also throwing junior programmers into the deep end of the pool without a life jacket.