“I know plenty of people who … essentially everything they used to do, they have outsourced to something like a large language model. And I don't know what they're giving up by doing that. In one sense, they're getting a lot out of it. They're probably 10 times as productive as they used to be in terms of code to get some functionality. And at the same time, they're probably losing 10% of their brain cells or failing to exercise them properly. And I just don't know.”
The Developing Dev · Software Engineering & Infra · October 2026
Context
Kernighan, the Princeton professor and Unix pioneer, on programmers who now hand nearly all their work to AI. He says whatever anyone says about this today will probably be wrong in a month, and that faculty don't know what to teach students worried their jobs won't exist.
Transcript
…query? Because I'm not an SQL expert. And if we already knew the answer, we wouldn't need it. And so I'm wrestling with that. And my observation is 90% of the time it generates a perfectly fine query and 10% of the time it doesn't gives you a totally wrong answer. And I don't know which is which.
It sounds like what you're saying is you need some domain expertise. Otherwise, you can't be the judge of if it's.
…by yourself. So you need something AI again. To help you with generating the test, but then you need something to evaluate whether the tests were properly generated. And there's this infinite regress of, you know, check the checker, who checked the checker kind of thing. Now, I'm oversimplifying, and I'm not a high-powered user. And I know plenty of people who, as you described, are, you know, essentially everything they used to do, they have outsourced to something like a large language model. And I don't know what they're giving up by doing that. In one sense, they're getting a lot out of it. They're probably 10 times as productive as they used to be in terms of code to get some functionality. And at the same time, they're probably losing 10% of their brain cells or failing to exercise them properly. And I just don't know. It's early, and things, whatever we say today in a week or a month, will not probably be correct anymore. The place where this shows up, right around here at least, is kids worrying about what's going to happen when I get out of here. I wanted to be a software engineer. Does that job still exist? And the answer is maybe, but it's different than it would have been two or three years ago. And by…
In the world you described, which is today's world, the models are not perfect. There's a lot of subtleties where they get things wrong. But in a world where they are perfect and they're kind of doing everything, what just like out of curiosity, what happens to a computer science major?
Well, I mean, first, you have a premise there, which is that these things will become perfect. And I suspect they won't become perfect, although they may become a lot better than they are right now. So there's probably still going to be a need for somebody to assess their perfection. I think the…
When C came out, were people mourning assembly language?
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