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Pedagogy is the way
Looking back at three years of thinking and posting about ai assisted coding.
It’s three years since I first wrote about AI assisted coding. You can still read that post on the Glitch blog: Software development isn't writing syntax
A lot has happened since then, but as I said in a weirdly popular LinkedIn post recently, my beliefs have proven pretty resilient – tl;dr:
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On convenience and understanding
Can we leverage automation while still preserving understanding?
"There is some compulsion in software where automation breeds more automation and we accidentally leap over the phase where it was actually optimal for both usefulness and understanding." Me, on mastodon the other day
Being able to generate code is forcing us to figure out when it’s a good idea to actually write it.
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How should we teach software development now?
Exploring software development learning topics in the context of AI-assisted coding.
Yesterday I posted on LinkedIn about realising I've been thinking and writing about AI-assisted coding for three years now, and that overwhelmingly I still stand by the positions I've taken. My first public post on the subject was in May 2023, so I'm going to revisit it on the same day this year. But for now, since the discussion touched on what we should be teaching on software engineering courses, it prompted me to jot down my current thinking, still very much WIP but here you go.
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Automation is a trade-off
We should have more explicit conversations about the trade-offs we make when we use automations.
This post was originally published on dev.to.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about abstractions. I’m revisiting it here with AI-assisted coding in mind, because I see similar issues arising. LLMs make it easier than ever to generate code, but when we look at what happens next, the picture becomes a little bit less clear.
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What to do about developer skills
This week I talked at Haggis Ruby in Glasgow.
I've been giving talks about developer learning and AI-assisted coding pretty regularly over the last couple of months. Doing this is helping me clarify my own thoughts and better position me to advise others, based on what I've learned about software engineering and pedagogy over the years. This week I had the pleasure of speaking at Haggis Ruby in Glasgow, with a community I wasn't part of but who could not have been more welcoming and open to what I was saying. ❤️
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