In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the new staff starts from cooking rice perfectly first and perfecting roasted seaweed before moving on to preparing an egg sushi and then graduating to fish.
It's not grunt work.
It's how new engineers learn the ropes and gain experience doing low risk work; it's part of the learning process that only feels like grunt work to a senior dev.
I do not think that OP is arguing you should not learn the basics.
Tools like Copilot are very useful because if you need to create a function that takes a FLOAT in addition to the one you just wrote that takes an INT then its right there already. Sometimes I am just trying to bang together something quick for testing just so I can continue on with the actual project.
When I learned to write I did not just paste from Wikipedia into my essays, I would distill words from the articles I read into my own thoughts and writing. These tools are absolutely useful, but it is what you make of it.
> I do not think that OP is arguing you should not learn the basics.
That's not my point, per se.
> It's clear that we have too much grunt work.
What one might see as "grunt work" is what another might see as "learning the ropes".
You can make the case "with ChatGPT, we no longer need to learn the ropes".
But it's really hard to predict how that will affect the next generation of engineers -- I don't even know if "engineers" is the right word -- if they only understand how to ask and not how to construct.
I'd say that my point is that grunt work is very meaningful to someone who is in a different phase of their career. It's not just grunt work, but a pathway to learn.
They’re just higher ropes, instead of cutting your teeth on a Todo app you’ll be writing the apps+web+API equivalent. ie you’ll learn architecture first.
It's not grunt work.
It's how new engineers learn the ropes and gain experience doing low risk work; it's part of the learning process that only feels like grunt work to a senior dev.