Has AI Conquered Coding? (It’s Not So Simple…) | AI Reality Check
5/21/202613 min
Cal Newport takes a critical look at recent AI News. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Has AI conquered coding? (3:21) Lars Faye quote (5:25) Skipping the struggle step (6:42) Point #1 (7:08) Point #2 (7:28) Point #3 (7:39) Point #4 (8:35) Solution Links: Sign up for Cal’s newsletter at www.calnewport.com/ideas Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap https://www.infoworld.com/article/4143101/pity-the-developers-who-resist-agentic-coding.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsCal Newport· Host0:00
Within technology circles, there's a lot of buzz right now about a recent essay written by a professional programmer and entrepreneur named Lars Faye. It opens with the following description of the current state of affairs of AI-driven software development. I'm gonna read here. "This workflow takes many shapes at this point, but in general it is a process where someone defines the project's requirements, generates a plan, and then pulls the slot machine lever over and over, iterating and reiterating with often multiple agent instances until it's done, all the while putting a growing distance between the orchestrator and the code that is being generated and committed." Now, this new approach to computer programming has thrown the industry into a frenzy of excitement, and I really do mean excitement. Let me read you a real quote from an essay that a developer posted just a couple months ago. Now, I'm reading here. "What a fantastic time to be alive. With Claude Code, I have become, if I do say so myself, a 10X developer. Sometimes it feels like 100X. I find it all thrilling and amazing. It's all intoxicating. To watch Claude Code work, to ask it to do something that I know would take a week, or to have it figure out some complex bug that I would've taken three days to debug, is almost too much to believe. I don't have the superlatives to describe it." Hmm, now what does that rhetoric remind me of?
Paul Vasquez· Soundbite1:27
[wind blowing] Whoa, that's a