Two AI Programming Paradigms: Dialog vs. Autonomous

Eleanor Berger shares her experience with two primary approaches to AI-assisted programming: dialog-based and fully autonomous. Dialog-based programming involves interacting with AI assistants for advice, code completion, and suggestions. Fully autonomous programming relies entirely on AI to generate code, with the programmer only reviewing the output. Berger finds both methods valuable but difficult to mix effectively, as understanding code written by others (or AI) is challenging and error-prone. She explores strategies for combining the approaches, such as per-project or per-module separation. She predicts a future shift towards fully autonomous programming due to improving AI capabilities and the inherent inefficiency of manual coding in comparison.