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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

#31

Post by skydhash »

t_mahmood wrote: post #21
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…

A manager is not going to handle all the nitty gritty details, that an engineer knows, fine say, they can ask a LLM to make a web portal. Does he know about SQL injection? XSS? Maybe he knows slightly about security stuffs and asks the LLM to make a secure site with all the protection needed. But how the manager knows it works at all? If you figure out there's a issue with your critical part of the software, after yo…

It's like saying "I want a bridge" and then expect steel beams and cables to appear (or planks and ropes) and that's all you need. The user needs are usually clear enough (they need a way to cross that body of water or that chasm), but the how is the real catch.

In the real world, the materials are visible so people have a partial understanding on how it gets done. But most of the software world is invisible and has no material constraints other than the hardware (you can't use RAM that is not there). If the hardware is like a blank canvas, a standard web framework is like a draw by the numbers book (but one with lines drawn by a pencil so you can erase it easily). Asking the user to code with LLM is like asking a blind to draw the Mona Lisa with a brick.

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

#32

Post by symfrog »

empath75 wrote: post #27
symfrog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closer you get to releasing software, the less useful LLMs become. They tend to go into loops of 'Fixed it!' without having fixed anything. In my opinion, attempting to hold the hand of the LLM via prompts in English for the 'last mile' to production ready code runs into the fundamental problem of ambiguity of natural languages. From my experience, those developers that believe LLMs are good enough for production…

This is not my experience with claude code. It does forget big picture things but if you scope your changes well it’s fine.

I would estimate that out of every 200 lines of code that Claude Code produces, I notice at least 1 issue that would cause severe problems in production.

In my opinion these discussions should include MREs (minimal reproducible examples) in the form of prompts to ground the discussion.

For example, take this prompt and put it into Claude Code, can you see the problematic ways it is handling transactions?

---

The invoicing system is being merged into the core system that uses Postgres as its database. The core system has a table for users with columns user_id, username, creation_date . The invoicing data is available in a json file with columns user_id, invoice_id, amount, description.

The data is too big to fit in memory.

Your role is to create a Python program that creates a table for the invoices in Postgres and then inserts the data from the json file. Users will be accessing the system while the invoices are being inserted.

---

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

#33

Post by citrin_ru »

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.

Endgame is to produce AI which will not need any supervision by the time the current generation of experienced developers will retire or even sooner. I don’t know if it will happen but many bet on this and models are still improving, flattening is not yet seen.

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

#34

Post by marginalia_nu »

jleyank wrote: post #28

Developers are “unwanted overhead” until the customer money threatens to walk out the door. They’re going to damage their future products and probably reduce their customer base (fewer consumers) and then sit there looking like gaffed fish when the budget ink turns red. “Who would have thought…” Don’t facilitate losing your job.

Funny part is we've already had this exact thing happen with outsourcing. It sure looked like a bargain until you got to such pesky details as correctness and maintainability.

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

#36

Post by kqr »

ldng wrote: post #24
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

Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.

... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs.

The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.

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

#37

Post by elasticeel »

bananaflag wrote: post #17
quotemstr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they though? Our do they learn that having a good engineer means they can assign ambiguous tasks and the software developer can reason through good decision making and follow up with clarifying questions.

LLMs need to get better at asking clarifying questions and trying to show the initial solution might not work. Even when they get better at that, this article states that managers not capable of thinking through the answers well enough will fall short and this is the space that developers live in.

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

#38

Post by xg15 »

cjfd wrote: post #2

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

It's "democratizing" in the same way Uber "democratized" taxis...

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

#39

Post by tkel »

cjfd wrote: post #2

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.

Democracy is about governance, not access.

A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

jleyank wrote: post #28

Developers are “unwanted overhead” until the customer money threatens to walk out the door. They’re going to damage their future products and probably reduce their customer base (fewer consumers) and then sit there looking like gaffed fish when the budget ink turns red. “Who would have thought…” Don’t facilitate losing your job.

[deleted]
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