Why a Beginner with Claude Did Not Become a Senior

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Advertising copy of recent years is fond of the phrase that artificial intelligence has democratised software development. The phrase is half true. What has been democratised is the production of code: now anyone with a browser and a few dollars a month can get it. The understanding of what that code does and how it will end has not been democratised, and nobody has yet learned to hand it out for free.

Something similar has happened to other crafts before. When cheap electric jigsaws appeared, anyone could cut boards, and stools began to be made by people who had never held a saw. The stools still wobble for those who do not know why the legs must be the same length and what the crossbar between them is for, and the jigsaw has nothing to do with it: it cuts where it is pointed.

What exactly a person who has assembled a program with AI for the first time does not know, and why this ignorance has become more dangerous than before, is easiest to show on the same nail salon.

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Two clients open the website at the same moment, and both want to book with Kristina on Saturday at eleven in the morning. The program is built in the most natural way: first it checks whether the time is free, and if it is, it books the client. The first client presses the button, the program checks and sees that the time is free. In the same fraction of a second the second client presses the button, the program checks and also sees that the time is free, because the first booking has not yet had time to be saved. Both receive a confirmation, and on Saturday at eleven Kristina has two clients and one chair.

Developers call this a race condition: the result depends on which of two simultaneous processes gets there first. On a small website it happens once a month, on a large one hundreds of times a day, and it is one of the most insidious errors, because it is almost impossible to see during testing: an administrator testing the site alone never presses the button at the same moment as herself. Races have long-known cures, for example a rule at the database level that physically does not allow two clients to be booked for the same time. But to apply the cure you have to know about the disease.