91–100 of 246 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.
To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk. Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My…
A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic, and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder.
All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises." Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes. Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs going away? No.
I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…
I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.
I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk. Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My…
Back in the 80's there were ads for tools to "dinosaurs" who everyone looked to when their 4GL language failed to solve the problem.