I hate AI slop code as much as the rest of you. Really.

But I also say this a lot: With every evolution of interacting with computers, the last generation will say "that's not real programming"

Brendan O'Leary at SCALE wrote a whole talk about it! And how to approach AI assisted development ⭐

Slides from the talk are here: https://brendan.fyi/cobol

This slide is a nice illustration

(though I'd swap punchcards for wiring, since punchcards do still transmit a programming language, and I tend to break it down a little further, C programmers can be quite snobby about Python)

@pleia2 Except there is at least one fundamental difference between the X->Prompt abstraction and everything else he brings up (based on the slides):

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/12/19/can-chatbots-craft-correct-code/

@buherator It's not a perfect analogy, and I do actually agree with most of that article.

We've really put our industry in a bad spot by not putting enough thought into how we should be using these tools 😐 I'm glad people are putting time into it.