Driving slowly gives greater control
As Shubham reminds us with his car analogy, “The lower the gear in a car, the more control you have over the engine, but you go with less speed.” As applied to coding, “If you feel in control, go to a higher gear. If you are overwhelmed or stuck, go to a lower gear.” That’s the secret. It’s always personal to the developer in question and requires a level of self-awareness, but that’s the key. As Shubham says, “AI-assisted coding is all about grokking when you need to gain more granular control and when you need to let go of control to move faster,” recognizing that “higher-level gears leave more room for errors and trust issues.”
More senior engineers seem to understand this, entrusting AI tools cautiously (i.e., using them to get more done while in “lower gears” like auto-complete). The problem is that junior engineers and non-engineers trust AI tools way more than they should. To some extent, we can blame years of marketing by low-code/no-code platforms that promise to turn everyone into a developer without any (or much) software knowledge. This has always been a false hope.
Here’s the solution: If you want to use AI coding assistants, don’t use them as an excuse not to learn to code. The robots aren’t going to do it for you. The engineers who will get the most out of AI assistants are those who know software best. They’ll know when to give control to the coding assistant and how to constrain that assistance (perhaps to narrow the scope of the problem they allow it to work on). Less-experienced engineers run the risk of moving fast but then getting stuck or not recognizing the bugs that the AI has created.