Joshua Karoly is a 17-year-old high school senior who lives near Sacramento, California and wants to pursue a career as a software developer. He hopes that as more people become more dependent on artificial intelligence, he will be able to use his coding skills to acquire jobs. For Brevity and Clarity, the following has been edited:
When I was in my second year, I started programming with Scratch. This is very basic block-based programming. I realized that I could now make a game. I said, “It's great. I love games.” Then I got a book about Python in the library. From there I entered the code and it looked like, “Oh, I drew a square and created a clickable button.” Then I moved to Khan Academy.
From there, I have been doing my own way in terms of complexity. Much of this was during Covid distance learning. I was programming when I was supposed to pay attention to my class. That's where I got a lot of my experience. It was a very nerdy act.
AI might fix one thing and break something else
When you are a child, people always ask you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I was interested in computers. So, since sophomore, I'll say, “I want to be a programmer.”
When it comes to AI, I've seen people do cool things, so I knew neural networks would be there for a while. Back before Openai got very big, they had a generator of songs that made songs in the style of classical composers and others. I thought that was the coolest thing I've ever done.
At the same time, AI training methods are designed to provide output that is as accurate as possible, even if it's wrong. Often it tells you it works, and while it appears to be, it's not, it works a bit.
So I spend a lot of time debugging AI code, but that was my experience. I used it from time to time, so it helped me to debug my code and get ideas on how to figure out what, but in general I don't think this code is of the highest quality.
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At the beginning of the summer, I did a game jam. There, I spend a week making a game. I had the problem with the code I wrote completely not detecting where something was. I fed it to AI and it was like, “Oh, this is your problem.”
It returned the code to me and it wasn't my problem. I kept asking it over and over and over and over and tried to help it, but it didn't help me. I finally had to figure it out myself a few hours later.
Vibe coding alone can go quite far, but it usually becomes more complicated. As the project grows and grows, it becomes more complicated about what AI can tackle. It might fix one thing and then break something else. As your project grows, problems can arise as AI can focus on only one thing. It's difficult for even humans, at least for me. I'm just a teenager.
I hope other young people are too focused on AI
I'm not yet really worried about some big AI supercomputers taking over everything or doing potential work. It could play a role in how those jobs are executed. Maybe they're few.
AI has given me some ideas, but I don't know about job safety as there are already many workers in programming.
My age is what everyone else wants to be more focused on AI than they should. So when the bubble explodes a bit, or when there's a job where AI can't work, I know how to deal with it, so I'm going to be the guy at work.
I've only been on this planet for 17 years, but I'm not that good at predicting the future yet. I hope that as people continue to rely on AI, people who are not dependent on AI will also be important.
You can use AI as a tool. I did that, but I try not to resort to it as many people do. For example, in a class, many people use AI, so they don't really know what to do without it.
AI is not yet good at reasoning. It has a long way to go before starting a massive work change of work I want to do or the work that most programmers do.
The ultimate dream is to run your own company and become your own boss. I enjoy using all sorts of things, especially code. Because it's abstract. The future is not stagnant. It's not going to stay like it is now.
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