I don’t think the code we consider “grunt work” should necessarily be eliminated. When communicating, it’s useful to have a certain amount of obvious stuff spelled out in order to ground the audience and let them understand the basic context in which the non-obvious stuff is happening.
For example, if you have a configuration, and a particular default would often (say 30% of the time) be overridden, I think it’s typically not a good idea for the default to exist in the first place. Having those defaults will certainly reduce the average config size, but they’ll also create more cognitive load for readers, who now not only don’t know what the default is, but don’t necessarily know that the choice is being made in the first place.
This is one of the things I think is so powerful about AI as a solution. It saves you from the work, but still conveys the basic context to readers without requiring them to understand a bunch of opinions baked into the language or framework.
The same applies to writing prose. When you give a bulleted list to ChatGPT and ask it to turn it into prose, a lot of the work it’s doing is filling in obvious text. But that obvious text is important to communication, and where you have to go and edit that obvious text for correctness will be some of the most important communication in the final product.
For example, if you have a configuration, and a particular default would often (say 30% of the time) be overridden, I think it’s typically not a good idea for the default to exist in the first place. Having those defaults will certainly reduce the average config size, but they’ll also create more cognitive load for readers, who now not only don’t know what the default is, but don’t necessarily know that the choice is being made in the first place.
This is one of the things I think is so powerful about AI as a solution. It saves you from the work, but still conveys the basic context to readers without requiring them to understand a bunch of opinions baked into the language or framework.
The same applies to writing prose. When you give a bulleted list to ChatGPT and ask it to turn it into prose, a lot of the work it’s doing is filling in obvious text. But that obvious text is important to communication, and where you have to go and edit that obvious text for correctness will be some of the most important communication in the final product.