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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

#71

Post by cmiles74 »

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 can take a verbal description from a meeting with five to ten people and put together something they can interact with in two weeks. That is a lot slower than Claude Code! Yet everywhere I’ve worked, this is more than fast enough.

Over two more weeks I can work with those same five to ten people (who often disagree or have different goals) and get a first draft of a feature or small, targeted product together. In those latter two weeks, writing code isn’t what takes time; working through what people think they mean verses what they are actually saying, mediating one group of them to another when they disagree (or mostly agree) is the work. And then, after that, we introduce a customer. Along the way I learn to become something of an expert in whatever the thing is and continue to grow the product, handing chunks of responsibility to other developers at which point it turns into a real thing.

I work with AI tooling and leverage AI as part of products, where it makes sense. There are parts of this cycle where it is helpful and time saving, but it certainly can’t replace me. It can speed up coding in the first version but, today, I end up going back and rewriting chunks and, so far, that eats up the wins. The middle bit it clearly can’t do, and even at the end when changes are more directed it tends toward weirdly complicated solutions that aren’t really practical.

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

#72

Post by aleph_minus_one »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #22
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…

> Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. This is not the case: - Before the 90s, programming was rather a job for people who were insanely passionate about technology, and working as a programmer was not that well-regarded (so no "growing opportunities"). - After the burst of the first dotcom bubble, a lot of programmers were unemployed. - Every older programmer can tel…

Correction: "Over the last decade" -> "Over the last decades [plural]".

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

#73

Post by cmiles74 »

edgyquant wrote: post #56
symfrog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 invo…

What he’s saying is split this up into multiple tasks to create the table, insert the data etc

Isn’t that the hard part? If the tasks are small enough and well defined, where’s the win over just writing the code right there and then?

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

#75

Post by guitarbill »

simonw wrote: post #64
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #62

One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

One counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe isn't the best argument.

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

#76

Post by nz »

shiandow wrote: post #68

LLMs seem quite successful when considered something like a natural langiage interface, but expecting intelligence seems a step too far. For one they do not learn, at least not online, and that is a somewhat important requirement for truly intelligent behaviour. Arguably programming is as much learning as it is writing code. This is part of the reason some people copy an entire API and don't realise they're not so mu…

In some sense, programming is about figuring out which algorithms are a fitting metaphor for business problems. By programming, you are building a model of the business problem and a model of its solution. Most of the non-programmers who are in positions of authority (managers, CEOs, even some CTOs), do not understand that this is what programmers do. From their point of view, the authorities come up with a "strategy", after dozens of meetings, and give the programmers vague instructions based on the strategy, and programmers turn those instructions into code that does something somewhere, usually after finding ways to avoid bad or unfeasible ideas, while still complying with the instructions.

To them, an LLM is indistinguishable from a programmer. From the point of view of authority, progress happens one meeting at a time. The reality is that there is a pyramid of experts beneath the authorities, that keep everything running smoothly, in spite of the best attempts of the authorities to demolish the foundation of the pyramid by "helping".

EDIT: to end on a positive note, it does not have to be this way. We just have to be willing to understand _how_ the organization we are a part of actually functions. And that means actually being curious instead of merely authoritative. I understand that curiosity is hard to maintain when you swim with sharks, so maybe don't swim with sharks.

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

#77

Post by Johanx64 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #34
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.

For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit.

Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".

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

#78

Post by marginalia_nu »

Johanx64 wrote: post #77
marginalia_nu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit. Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuff…

You still have to ship a product though.

This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions of lines of code, to the point where shipping anything sizable in a working state on time without last minute scope reductions is nearly unheard of.

I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal post.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

ryanmcl wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

[dead]

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by PeterWhittaker »

ryanmcl wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

[dead]

Thoroughly insightful take!
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