Fluency vs. Translation

Over the holidays I was talking with my Gen Z¹ neices and nephews about language fluency. My niece speaks three languages, and she was saying she feels the weakest in Spanish. Her issue is that she doesn’t feel she has the ability to talk about more profound topics in Spanish, and that's why its her weakest. This got me thinking about the whole evolution of AI in coding and how it's oepned up the prospect of building and shipping applications without any sort of experience with programming languages.

The role of a developer, my role is changing dramatically as all these AI tools get sharper. But when I think about these anecdotes about people without coding knowledge vibe coding whole apps, it reminds me of using a translator to communicate in another language. I'm able to copy/paste from a translator (or as people do now, asking AI directly to translate) and be understood, but that doesn't mean I have fluency. I don't have the ability to express myself fully, to understand jokes, to understand the culture and history embedded in the language.

Perhaps vibe-coding can produce a surface-level understanding of code, and depending on the complexity, that could be enough. But curiousity still prevails. You start by copying and pasting, then you notice patterns, then you memorize a phrase, then you want to understand why it works. With code, that used to mean googling for a certain compiling error that you've never seen. Try one solution, iterate, try again. Now I guess you can just have your coding agent try, try again, etc. But could you really stand up a whole app (scaled and reliable) without understanding the language or architecture well?

Talking in a conversation in a foreign language is a bit similar - you can get by with the basics but you miss so much if you don't have fluency.

Footnotes

1. We looked up whatever the agreed date range for Gen Z is and most of them fall in that range. This exercise made me feel super old. ↩