The importance of intent(ion)

For some time the AI-based development has been going on now, and I’ve been watching closely how and what it changed as of today, by no means I am a AI expert however.

At first I was a bit sceptical, while AI can definitely help in our day-to-day life, it can also quite quickly create short-sightedness in which it becomes just as smart as you are.

Let me explain, you give a prompt to the AI, and the AI gives you an answer, which means that what stays in our own hands is writing the prompts and interpreting the answers for maybe writing further prompts. This means that describing our intent becomes more and more important, it is not only about who knows what line of code goes where best, it is turning into whether you’re able to describe your intent as detailed and clearly as possible.

Of course to, depending on the subject, write a prompt about something technical still requires you to be skilled at the fundamental level as you still have to determine the steps that need to be taken for the most part.

Previously when you wanted to automate something, you’d most likely started to figure out how it is done manually beforehand, with the availability of AI you’d have to be able to describe your intent and figure out the steps needed to be taken, then the AI will (or at least tries to) provide you with the required technical information to get where you want to be.

Of course you still want to verify or test the output of the AI before doing so in production.

I think this is an interesting shift of the way we learn things, as we can just start asking away and give it a try.