I hate to say it, but with all of the Rust rewrites we’re seeing (and going to keep seeing) Now is the perfect time to learn Rust. (especially lower level Rust)

Alternatively, you can do what I'm doing. I haven't bothered to learn how to write Rust by hand, because that's never going to happen. I've taught myself enough about how to read the language so that when I prompt an AI to generate it for me I can review the result. That's quite enough.

@esrtweet I’d argue that coding by hand is now a competitive advantage.

@dreamsofcode_io @esrtweet Sure, like manual machining - you might have some bespoke something or other. Meanwhile all the work gets done by computer.

@BigTanGringo @esrtweet Thought experiment: I’m hiring a developer to build a video editing application. Out of my 100 candidates. One has worked with ffmpeg before by hand, whereas the other 99 have only worked with ffmpeg through A.I. Guess which one I’m hiring.

@dreamsofcode_io @esrtweet I'm hiring the guy who can make AI sing and dance, sorry. This is the "manual machinist" copemobile all over again.

Do you believe there’s any skill to making A.I. sing and dance? I believe theres much more value in someone understanding the following concepts even exist: i frames, b frames, pts, preroll, codecs, clocks, alignment, hardware decoding, software decoding, real time audio threads, pixel formats etc etc LLMs love to write code that works, not necessarily code that’s correct.

> Do you believe there’s any skill to making A.I. sing and dance? Absolutely takes skill to get what you want out of AI, and it *mostly* doesn't look like knowing any particular language. > LLMs love to write code that works, not necessarily code that’s correct. Not to be that guy, but this is a skill issue pointing at the first question. They will definitely go off the rails, and knowing how to keep them on the rails is more important than knowing any particular esoteric thing.. because they've read it all too.

Fair on the skills, I agree results can vary based on the operator. However, I believe you still need a base understanding of a language and frameworks to know when/if the LLM has gone off the rails, especially with code correctness in a programming language, or with correctness in an implementation.

To be clear, I don't think complete novices vibe coding are anywhere near the level of an experienced dev. I think those are mostly matters of taste and refinement. But they matter A LOT. I think our agreement might be more in the nuance. My TLDR: They are ludicrously well read, to a fault.

@dreamsofcode_io @BigTanGringo @esrtweet Who’s more likely to produce a good outcome with AI: an experienced dev or a plumber? Even though the AI produces most of the code, I trust the dev more to ensure a good outcome