The AI coding trap
If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard. No, they (probably) aren’t slacking off. Software development is fundamentally a practice of problem-solving, and so, as with solving a tricky crossword, most of the work is done in your head. In the software development lifecycle, coding is the letters filled into the crossword, only a small amount of effort compared to all the head scratching and scribbled notes. The real work usually happens alongside coding, as the developer learns the domain, narrows down requirements, maps out relevant abstractions, considers side effects, tests features incrementally, and finally squashes bugs that survived this rigorous process. It looks something like this: But…
