How AI will shape the coding ecosystem in the future
Most people will think that AI contributes greatly to the coding ecosystem. On the contrary, I have a nagging feeling that things might become a disaster if things continue to pan out the way it currently going.
Here’s the most likely scenario:
- More people will generate content with AI
- Fewer people will give away quality resources publicly (to avoid AI from plagiarizing them).
- There will be more noise
- It’ll be harder to find quality resources
This doesn’t bode well for the community at large — because as the overall quality of resources decreases, so will the average quality of developers.
But this is also an opportunity for developers who can rise above the average AI level.
Al can help you learn code, but only to a certain level of expertise
Publicly available AI models (like ChatGPT and Bard) build their intelligence by aggregating resources that are found publicly.
They’re best at summarizing information.
So AI can help you learn code if the information that’s publicly available is already enough to help you understand what you’re learning.
But if you’re already stuck, AI will not be able to help you — because more of the same information is not going to help. So if you cannot understand a subject with the information found publicly, you will continue not to be able to understand what you found through AI.
To get unstuck, a different kind of information is necessary.
What you need is information that will correct your concepts (and the way you see things). And this information is not available in the public domain — if it was, you would already have found it and gotten unstuck already.
This kind of information is what I currently specialise in — I figure out where people get stuck and I teach them in ways that help them get unstuck, so they truly understand what’s happening and gain the power to be able to code freely.
This is something AI is unable to replicate. (It’s also expensive because it takes a lot of time and energy to be able to create content that does this).
And this is the premise behind all of the courses that I create in Magical Dev School.
More noise and less quality content make it harder to learn
More and more people are going to use AI to create content because AI lowers the content creation gap.
But since AI feeds off publicly available information, stuff that’s written by AI will simply be a regurgitation of what’s already in the public domain.
This means — none of the information created by AI is going to be helpful (because as we talked about earlier, it’s not going to give anyone any breakthroughs).
More of the same doesn’t help.
So the internet is going to become more cluttered as more people feed AI-created information into the network.
And people who can truly help will, unfortunately, be shadowed by the amount of AI-created content.
AI is still going to become useful to many developers
It’s going to help developers do many things — mostly as an initial layer of research, before diving into the depths.
Exactly how will it help?
There are too many ways to count.
I might run a series of workshops to explore how AI tools (Bard, ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.) contribute to a developer’s learning journey and creation process.
If you’re interested in this, email me and let me know.
I’ll decide whether to run these workshops depending on the amount of interest.