Live data from Hacker News

The Death of the Stubborn Developer

sourcegraph.com

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#11
post #2

Amazing, a company with a vested interest in our AI future of software development is bullish on the use of AI in software development. > Many of those graph nodes are leaf-node tasks, like “write an auth library” or “modernize these unit tests”. They tend to be fairly self-contained. We often give these leaf node tasks to junior developers because the scope is small. You know, the companies that hand "write an auth…

You can safely ignore any blog post with 'The death of...' in it's title.

As you say, companies telling us their products with dominate the future is nothing new. The next big job killer is always 5 years away, apparently.

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#12
I find the comparison to a "3D printed car" to be excellent!

What you end up with is a... car-shaped object!

There is a reason why even in Soviet Germany the car[1] still had a metal frame... If only all of it could have been made out of used pants[2]!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#13

I think he's right, and I hate it. I'm also depressed by his endgame, which he glosses over - LLMs prevent the gradual buildup of expertise through hard, repeated, work. All our handwriting (and hell, even our grammar) is basically trash, because who can be arsed putting in the time to write beautifully with a pen when you can just fling out an email? LLMs will cause an analogous decline in code and coders - every co…

> LLMs will cause an analogous decline in code

Which will lead to worse code being published at a way faster rate that good code used to be published. Which will be used to train future versions of the LLMs, which will amplify the decline in code.

> Fuck the future

As the article points out, this is not the future, it's the present.

Fuck the present.

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#15
Agreed that LLMs can make the role of junior developers become one of filtering out bad LLM output, and tuning a prompt until it outputs the right thing.

I think the concern that we won't have senior developers later if there are no junior developers now, is pretty valid. The question is if LLMs will keep up pace to replace senior developers when the current ones retire. Since no one can predict the future, it's a pretty risky gamble at the scale of the entire industry. (OTOH if this new tool sparks more interest in the occupation, then maybe the issue solves itself by sheer numbers.)

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#16
I still think @mpweiher's original response to the release of GitHub Copilot is spot on: https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/don-generate-glueextermi...

That is, rather than use an LLM to generate boilerplate code from an ambiguous natural-language prompt, use a high-level programming language to precisely, concisely, and directly express what you want.

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#17
As a relatively new senior developer who has witnessed the emergence of Copilot while progressing from Junior to mid senior and above, I completely disagree with the premise.

Junior developers have huge gaps in their knowledge, which they fill naturally by working on different parts of projects and getting their hands dirty. What's actually happening now in my company is that juniors who have been primarily using LLMs to code have a much worse grasp of the codebase, the tech stack and software engineering in general than those who don't, even if they deliver faster. Also, in a complex codebase, the number of mistakes they produce doesn't go down with time, because they're not actually learning from their previous mistakes and applying the learnings.

As a senior developer who used to use Copilot heavily, I have to admit it's a crazy performance boost when you're adding critical small changes here and there, across different codebases with different stacks, when you know what you want to do. However, I recently decided to stop my copilot subscription and go back to non-assisted coding, for multiple reasons: 1. Coding is fun 2. On a senior level, mistakes are more problematic. 3. Writing the code yourself results in much higher quality code, for me, than reviewing the LLM's code

In short, I disagree with the article

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#18
post #2

Amazing, a company with a vested interest in our AI future of software development is bullish on the use of AI in software development. > Many of those graph nodes are leaf-node tasks, like “write an auth library” or “modernize these unit tests”. They tend to be fairly self-contained. We often give these leaf node tasks to junior developers because the scope is small. You know, the companies that hand "write an auth…

You can safely ignore any blog post with 'The death of...' in it's title. As you say, companies telling us their products with dominate the future is nothing new. The next big job killer is always 5 years away, apparently.

> The next big job killer is always 5 years away, apparently

It really is, and really always has been. At least, when it comes to software.

What's always been hard, is knowing which of the many predictions about the real job killer will be correct, so that you can train for it.

In 2009, I was expecting that by 2019 the world would have widespread availability of self driving cars without steering wheels, and not just some geofenced examples and a promise of more "real soon now honest" as we're still at in 2024.

In 2019, I wasn't expecting LLMs to be even remotely as good as they turned out to be by 2022, let alone 2024.

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#19

> In my blog post I called this phenomenon Chat-Oriented Programming, CHOP for short (or just chop). Chop isn’t just the future, it’s the present. And if you’re not using it, you’re starting to fall behind the ones who are. > I’m going to stop qualifying this assertion as my opinion, because at this point it is entering into well-established fact territory. Ok one of these guys, moving on...

Well I wouldn't dismiss the article fully, but I agree a proper product demo showing a real session of this CHat Oriented Programming on a real project would go a long way removing the whiff of snake oil there.

My experience has been meh: LLMs let me enter unknown domains and get started, but a very large part of the LLM-generated code gets dumped once the right abstractions have been clarified.

Re: The Death of the Stubborn Developer

#20

Agreed that LLMs can make the role of junior developers become one of filtering out bad LLM output, and tuning a prompt until it outputs the right thing. I think the concern that we won't have senior developers later if there are no junior developers now, is pretty valid. The question is if LLMs will keep up pace to replace senior developers when the current ones retire. Since no one can predict the future, it's a pr…

when junior developers using LLMs become seniors we will have a different kind of senior developers. That won’t be the first time this happen actually. The Java generation and now the JS/Python generation change were very similar.
Post reply on HN