You should learn to code

The CEO of Nvidia at the end of last month claimed (again) that there was no need to learn to code. AI would take care of it.

Unlike Jensen, I could code - a very long time ago. Oh I could have made money in the noughties if I still remembered COBOL. But you tend to forget traumatic experiences (compiling errors). I can still cause trouble with Python. To be fair an IC diagram may as well be hieroglyphics to me.

But I wondered ‘Could you?’. So I asked ChatGPT to write a program to extract all attachments from Microsoft Outlook and save them to a folder (on a Mac).

It then responded with something that looked very clever, but involved Python and Microsoft Graph. Even I went ‘Eesh’.

(I’d use AppleScript)

This is again where the reporting and positioning of this stuff has to change. Developers don’t just bang out code. Good developers are very good at the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’. That’s their skill when bringing ideas to life. (I repeat, good developers).

By all means look at tools to assist. Nobody wants to lose time because of an errant character that you just can’t see. Efficiency is good. But you still need someone to understand what it’s doing, how it’s doing it and why you’re doing it. People with context. That’s going to be hard to do unless you learn it first. Never mind trying to work things out when it all decides to go horribly wrong.

Enhance not replace.