AI coding tools: A future of human and machine collaboration

It’s been a few years since I contributed production code to Ashby! But I’ve recently been able to carve out a bit of time to use various AI coding tools. My takeaway: Even though software development is becoming faster and more approachable with AI enabled coding tools, I predict there will remain a huge premium on high quality software. There’s a ton of nuance that goes into architecting, designing and building scalable software systems. AI tools today are awesome for rapid prototyping and some simple tasks. But they are still pretty far away from reliably producing high quality production code independently. Even if they evolve to become drastically more powerful, I predict human taste will remain a significant ingredient in all the best software products. I think the same applies to other roles - including recruiting. We’re very far from being able to hand off the core tasks of each role. But humans will be able to do less routine work. This also means that the returns to skills that are most critical for a specific role will be higher in future.