The AI Writing Your Code Has Never Run a Program (opens in new tab)

The simple version AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Claude generate code by predicting what text should come next, the same way they’d complete a sentence. They have never compiled, run, or debugged a single program. What the model is actually doing When you ask an AI to write a function that sorts a list of users by last name, it doesn’t reason through the logic, test it against edge cases, and hand you the result. It does something more like this: it looks at your request and it...