Low Effort doesn't mean Low Value

On skepticism about the value of AI-generated code.

I’ve been doing and talking more about “Generative AI” recently, and one of the sentiments that I encounter from other software engineers when I’m talking about using it to build or generate code is skepticism, with a side order of the sentiment that AI-generated solutions aren’t as valuable as human-crafted code.

The skepticism I’ve seen from naysayers covers a broad range of arguments - about how good the code would be, how much value it adds, and whether it’s even worth the investment of effort to introduce. I think that this skepticism exists because there’s a perception that if something takes no effort to create, it doesn’t actually add any value - which is an interesting thought, and one that I think is skewed by self-protectionist bias.

I think that as software Engineers we like to believe that we are special, and that what we create is imbued with additional value as a byproduct of our own thought processes when we create that code but ultimately it’s just code.

Code is no more valuable if you created it with a plain text editor instead of a rich development environment or IDE, and code is no less value if created by AI.

Code is no more valuable if it’s written in a different language if it solves the same problem.

Code does a thing and it doesn’t matter how you created the thing.

The solution is what matters, and the idea that code created with AR being somehow less valuable.

The progression of technology, the creation and adoption of new tools, it’s scary and threatening and will irreparably change the face of industries. As a thinking and feeling human in these industries where hoards of emotionless AI Agents are poised to take over, I am concerned for the future shape of our job roles and our craft. But disengaging from that future and not shaping it is a strategic error that will only hamper ourselves and leave us lagging behind in the tooling arms race.

AI can create and spit out the code so easily that we question the amount of effort behind it, and the amount of blood, sweat and tears that have gone into the code, but that’s just protectionist thinking. It’s the solution that matters. For the moment at least, humans still write the prompts and frame the problems and shape the solutions.

While that remains the case, the game hasn’t fundamentally changed, it’s just the tools that have gotten better.