Episode 512: Can non-engineers really contribute code with AI and not sharing

About this episode

Dave and Jamison discuss the challenges and implications of non-engineers contributing code in the age of AI.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Should I declare my struggle with this AI world we live in here? Nah. I mean, I’d like the hype to die down, a lot, but we keep getting new tools and I get to experiment, so here we are. My real struggle, and this podcast is implicated in it, is around non-technical people contributing to production systems. Why are we so obsessed with this idea? COBOL tried it. Low-code and no-code tried it. BDD and Gherkin aspire to it. Yet time and again the field demonstrates that you need people who know their stuff. To “democratize” software engineering implies that all people have the desire and ability to become software engineers. That premise is false. You democratize access to education or financial systems, the stock market say. You don’t democratize skill. Skills are earned. We would never, I hope, democratize bridge engineering or piloting an aircraft. Software engineers are just as critical as either. When our software breaks, money goes missing, electrical grids fail, information stops flowing. What I do think is great: now more than ever, as long as tokens stay cheap, people have more ability to build useful tools for…

People in this episode

Hosts: Dave, Jamison

Topics covered

• AI
• software engineering
• non-technical contributions
• democratization of skills
• low-code
• no-code

Keywords

• AI
• software engineering
• non-technical
• democratization
• low-code
• no-code
• skills

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