Coding (producing code text) and software engineering are fundamentally different disciplines, so AI fluency at generating code doesn't mean AI is good at software engineering.
Howard argues executives like Dario Amodei and Elon Musk conflate typing code with the much broader discipline of software engineering when predicting AI will replace engineers. ✦ AI generated
Jeremy Howard · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-03-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 27:56
Software engineering is a unusual discipline and a lot of people mistake it for being the same as typing code into an IDE. Coding is another one of these style transfer problems. You take a specification of the problem to solve and you can use your compositional creativity to find the parts of the training data which interpolated between them solve that problem and interpolate that with syntax of the target language and you get code.
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:56
27:56same as typing code into an IDE. Coding is another one of these style transfer problems. You you take a specification of the problem to solve and you can use your compositional creativity to find the parts of the training data which interpolated between them solve that problem and interpolate that with syntax of the target language and you get code. There's a very famous essay by Fred Brooks written many decades ago um
28:28no silver bullet and which it almost sounded like he was talking about today it it he was specifically saying something he was responding to something very similar which is in those days it was all like oh what about all these new fourth generation languages and stuff like that you know we're not going to need any coders anymore any software engineers anymore because software is now so easy to write anybody can write
28:52it Um, and he said, well, he guessed that you could get at maximum a 30% improvement. He specifically said a 30% improvement in the next decade, but I don't think he needed to limit it that much because the vast majority of work in software engineering isn't typing in the code. >> Yeah. Um, so in some sense parts of what Dario said were right, just like for quite a
29:21few people now most of their code is being typed by a language model. Um, that's true for me. Uh, say like maybe 90%. Um, but it hasn't made me that much more productive. um because that was never the slow bit. It's also helped me with kind of the research a lot and figuring out, you know, which files are going to be touched. But anytime I've made any attempt at
29:55getting an LLM to like design a solution to something that hasn't been designed lots of times before, [snorts] it's it's horrible because what it actually every time gives me is the design of something that looks on its surface a bit similar. And often that's going to be an absolute disaster because things that look on their surface a bit similar and like I'm literally trying to create something new to get away from