I’ve been writing code with GPT and GitHub Copilot for the better part of a year, and yet people are still debating whether AI can write code at all.
The code isn’t perfect, sure. But the first trains couldn’t outrun horses either. How clumsy a technology is at the start almost never tells you how high it will eventually reach.
It brings to mind Douglas Adams’s rules, from The Salmon of Doubt:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
How we judge a technology often has less to do with the technology than with how old we were when it showed up.