Relevant:
Writing code versus shipping code: Productivity effects across generations of AI coding tools - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/writing-code-versus-shipping-...
Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
131–140 of 206 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. This, to me, is the biggest differentiator. In terms of results, there's a huge yawning chasm between the person who says "Claude make me a $thing" versus the person who puts in the effort to lay down the overall architecture, gives some thoughts to libraries and dependencies, performan…
> Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important. This was never important. The important part was always knowing when to use them.
Even more narrow - you only need to know when to consider them.
I only ever bothered remembering enough of any algorithm to know my options and a few rules of thumb. If I ever actually need to consider the details of the algorithm, I certainly need to spend a lot more time thinking through the problem and its solution. Knowing a specific algorithm well enough to pump out in 15 minutes is a party trick that is as useful as being able to change a tire in 3 minutes flat. A great time saver that will be functionally useful maybe 3 times in your life...
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#133My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…
Coding is the easy part, huh? Sure, buddy.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The electricity cost per unit of machine “reasoning” is vastly less than the cost of salary for human reasoning. That’s a weak argument. You should focus on the second part… LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions, and the complexity they introduce has a cost.
> LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions ... ... by default .
Not sure why this is downvoted but you truly can get a lot of mileage out of asking Claude to simplify things.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#135"Computer" use to be a job title. So no, I am not optimistic about the future of most programmers, maybe even all programmers. One possibility is that software starts to look more like traditional manufacturing. The machine is the company’s core asset. The engineer only needs to know how to operate the machine well. Once that happens, the barrier gets much lower, need much less people, and the job naturally become mu…
A well-equipped local-AI-capable machine is already much cheaper than a CNC machine -- and will presumably get cheaper over time, RAM prices notwithstanding.
I'm not sure the comparison works if individuals can afford these machines themselves and don't have to commute to a factory to use them; I doubt employers will serve as either gatekeepers or sole providers of access to AI.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#136I think a lot of developers probably FEEL like they are in super mode, but in reality they're just letting Claude drive the boat and they get to wear the captain's hat. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AI Natives will be faster in the end and can build / do more, or building software really is a dead field - but I noticed that I was losing my brain and had to get back into the seat. There are definitely great use cases for age…
i understand your concern about relaying too much on ai tools like claude. while they can enhance productivity, they shouldnt replace critical thinking and problem solving skills that define good software developer so yea taking break from ai and working on "old" way can help sharpen those skills. i think its important to strike balance between working on new/old way but i also have feeling that everyone is addicted and trying to develop 24/7 cos someone might "steal" their idea. like theres some kind of imaginary race and if u dont code for 1 day with claude (even if it is nonsense) u wont end up first...
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude writes probably 95% of our code now, fintech, amongst top 5 in the world in what we do. I am 100% certain we're not even at the forefront of using agents for coding compared to some others. It definitely can scale.
Are there any code reviews? Or is AI reviewing code also?
We still review everything. And we guide by planning, prompting, speccing.
So we're not actually much faster at the core code, because reviews still take time. Ultimately, we're on the finance markets and we have regulatory pressures and I, as the human, am responsible for putting the code out there.
But we're freeing up a lot of time to get other things correct. We have n x more metrics now because plumbing in basic stuff is now trivial. We now have dozens more tools and skills to help analyse issues (e.g. why this price and not x), answer questions, etc.
I now have skills to scrape logs, download unpack and scape our bus persistence, link to kdb, and so on, all in my claude prompt, joining it all together and the AI is figuring things out. I can diagnose things, I don't know, maybe 100 times faster?
It is revolutionary, and I am highly sceptical of the motivations of people who keep saying otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#138My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…
> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.
That's exactly why I don't have AI writing my code. It is doing the easiest part of the job (making symbols appear in the text), which isn't actually valuable to me. A good tool should help me to do hard things, not easy things.
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#139It doesn't matter what you're doing, there's always a trade off to taking a shortcut and rarely does the price not need paying.
We're seeing lots of code being ~written~ generated, deployed, checked (tested manually), then shipping it as done. Fine for the simplist of things, but in a complex system unintended side effects are far more common.
I feel like the system analyst role is going to make a resurgence in the coming years. Once the domain knowledge is lost, there's going to be a need to re-discover it and understand what should be happening and what is happening.
Going against the grain - i don't think all but the most expensive (and non critical) SaaS products are going to be replaced by an in-house system. If you're company of 100 people is spending $12k a year on HR software. Building and running it yourself isn't going to save you 12k and in reality it's going to cost you headcount for someone to manage and maintain it. Mattermost exists and people still pay Slack $200 per year per user when they could just roll out Mattermost "for free".
Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
#140[flagged]