The Times Are Changing
As I grow older, I begin to realize how simple the development cycle has become. The introduction of public-use game engines, artificial intelligence, and well-documented instructional pages has alleviated much of the stress of coding.
I remember when I first started coding. The year was 2010, and I was 12 years old. My mother worried about my addiction to gaming but saw an opportunity in my desire to make games of my own. Programming back then was raw and complex. I began programming in C++, as every child should, and worked with the SFML library to make barebones platformers.
Nowadays, I have an appreciation of most languages (except JavaScript and web designing languages) and use the extended tools integrated by those more skilled than myself to help expedite the programming process. But even with the introduction of Unity and C-Sharp into my toolset, those technologies feel incomparably small to what followed.
Artificial Skillset
I want to premise this by stating that, for now, you should learn to program. You should learn about the space and time complexities that raw coders had to worry about. You should learn about all the fundamentals of code, how variables, conditions, loops, functions, classes, pointers, interfaces and abstractions work. I do fear that my many years of programming will eventually mean nothing in my lifetime, as I am replaced with a machine that I helped to make.
You would be a fool not to use Artificial Intelligence, even if the code isn’t perfect; it starts with such speed that a good coder follows the logic and fills in the blanks. There have been many times when I’ve envisioned what I want to accomplish but sat in front of my screen, thinking about where to start. An hour passes, and then two, but nothing becomes of it. I know myself better now. Artificial Intelligence oftentimes produces glaring mistakes but has the right idea with the direction of the code (Or whoever’s training data fed it). I feel comfortable knowing that I perform well as a sort of “Spell-Check” for code produced by an AI.
Sometimes, if I want a morale boost, I simply ask AI what general steps it would take to deploy my ideas. I then replicate the steps it defines in code, and I work in tandem with Intellisense (another AI) to quickly accomplish what I’ve set out to do.
Gone are the days of having to read implementations from obscure libraries. I simply ask what Libraries I should use if I want to accomplish a task. I am immediately given a list of specific code libraries with their pros and cons along with exactly what classes and functions I should use. No more scrounging through rudely answered StackOverflow questions.
The future is now, the technology is here, and I plan to embrace it fully—until the day comes when, much like the carriage driver replaced by the automobile, I, too, am ultimately replaced by AI.