AI & Calculators

The world of AI feels like a boulder going downhill and gaining speed. I feel like I see new crazy things and automations that people are doing with AI. I too have been experimenting and incorporating it into my work. Everything seems to be pointing towards a future where we don’t need to code “by hand” anymore. Is that true?

Before the calculator, people exclusively did math by hand. Now, it’s considered ridiculous to do complex mathematical calculations this way. So let me ask, when you can solve complex math equations with the push of a button, what becomes important? The answer is the equation you put in.

With AI, I believe that writing code will become a lot more about the prompt than the actual code. For example, if two people are trying to make the same complicated website with AI, the one who will succeed will be the one who can give better prompts. Moreover, when looking at AI agent workflows, after a given input, the AI completes a series of steps to produce a result. The critical piece isn’t necessarily the result, it’s the instructions you give the AI to get to that result. Just like setting up an equation to put into a calculator, it’s about the prompts you give to an AI that I believe will dictate success.

Does this mean that knowing how to code won’t be important? I don’t think so. When I code using AI, so much of what I say to AI is impacted by what I know about the code I’m working with. Coding AI slop isn’t hard, but knowing how to code inevitably helps me explain to the AI what I want when it does it wrong.

Well, we'll see how right or wrong I am in the future. See you then.

- Marius