Three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer
Larry Wall, the creator of Perl langauge, famously said that laziness, impatience, and hubris are the three great virtues of a programmer. These three “virtues” turns out to be a great hiring advice because laziness drove us to automate the mundane, which translates to discover new optimisation opportunities; impatience pushed us toward more performant, often simpler and more elegant, solutions; hubris gave us the courage, or stupidity, to work on problems others couldn’t solve.
How about AI-assisted programmers?
Sean Goedecke proposes a compelling answer. He argues that AI-assisted programmers need the following virtues:
- Obsession to keep your own mind working at the problem
- Impatience to eject and work it out yourself
- Suspicious of what the AI is doing