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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#11

Post by danhau »

bananaflag wrote: post #3

Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…

Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail.

How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful when paired with a programmer.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#14

Post by ryanjshaw »

Roark66 wrote: post #8
ryanjshaw wrote: post #4

Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding. Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe. It won’t be l…

After 2 years of using all of these tools (Claude C, Gemini cli, opencode with all models available) I can tell you it is a huge enabler, but you have to provide these "expert guardrails" by monitoring every single deliverable. For someone who is able to design an end to end system by themselves these tools offer a big time saving, but they come with dangers too. Yesterday I had a mid dev in my team proudly present a…

Yup. I’m not expert so maybe I’m completely off base, but if I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d likely just hire 1000 highly skilled engineers across multiple disciplines, tell them to build something in their domain of expertise, then critique the model’s output, iteratively work on guardrails for a month or two until the model one-shots the problem, and package that into the new release.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#15

Post by quotemstr »

bananaflag wrote: post #3

Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…

The thing about talking to computers is less the formality and more the specificity. People don't know what they want. To use an LLM effectively, you need to think about what you want with enough clarity to ask for it and check that you're getting it. That LLMs accept your wishes in the form of natural language instead of something with a LALR(1) grammar doesn't magically obviate the need for specificity and clarity in communication.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#16

Post by cafebabbe »

danhau wrote: post #11
bananaflag wrote: post #3

Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…

Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail. How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a m…

AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer.

Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice.

I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#17

Post by bananaflag »

quotemstr wrote: post #15
bananaflag wrote: post #3

Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…

The thing about talking to computers is less the formality and more the specificity. People don't know what they want. To use an LLM effectively, you need to think about what you want with enough clarity to ask for it and check that you're getting it. That LLMs accept your wishes in the form of natural language instead of something with a LALR(1) grammar doesn't magically obviate the need for specificity and clarity…

Agree that one needs clarity, but how does that differ from my example with the manager and the engineer? The manager also (ideally) learns in time that, when they are more clear, the engineer does the work better.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#18

Post by Havoc »

cyanydeez wrote: post #10
Havoc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools. What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers

The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on a long enough time line.

The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level.

If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#19

Post by duggan »

cafebabbe wrote: post #16
danhau wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail. How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a m…

AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer. Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice. I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.

Motivated novices will just learn differently, and produce different kinds of systems for different audiences with different expectations.

Some will dig into obscurities that LLMs don't or can't touch, others will orchestrate the tools, Gastown-style, into some as-yet-unknown form.

People will vibe themselves into a corner and either start learning or flame out.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#20

Post by bakugo »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #4

Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding. Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe. It won’t be l…

I've been hearing this for several years. How much longer is "it won't be long"?
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