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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

#141

Post by pixelsort »

nz wrote: post #107
pixelsort wrote: post #85

> There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what tools emerge. I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to ev…

Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their customers and their species. The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their time in the long run. Don't let greed…

The level of compliance and enthusiasm varies. Some believe they are making the world a better place. Some feel they're adding value but suspect they are trapped within a cycle they refuse to examine. Some are more connected to the truth, and comply willingly but resentfully.

Where you fall depends on where you work and what you work on.

You make a great points about the chain of accountability. But, in my opinion, working professionals are the only agents in the system with the potential to realize their own culpability and divert their actions.

Perhaps, it isn't fair to point to them and call them traitors. Still, they are the only ones with enough agency to potentially organize and collectively push for the kind of ethics that could save us all.

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

#142

Post by snackerblues »

zozbot234 wrote: post #117
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…

And that's why you ask for a high level plan for something like that before you let the agent write any code. Then you review the plan for flaws, revise it, and prompt the system to fill out more details for each step. Repeat as necessary. Yes it's slow, but it's the best way of using this "glorified autocomplete" to ease and speed up real work.

People that have never written their own code won't know what the flaws are.

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

#143

Post by snackerblues »

flagos10 wrote: post #97
cmiles74 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can use an LLM to generate that list of tasks.

And how does a new grad that's never actually programmed know whether that list of tasks makes sense?

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

#144

Post by SoftTalker »

benj111 wrote: post #118
ekidd wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence . The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavo…

Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…

> like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off.

They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.

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

#145

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

sfblah wrote: post #137

I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can emulate. But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are…

Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.

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

#146

Post by SoftTalker »

antonvs wrote: post #110
manithree wrote: post #95

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…

I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while drivin…

Was a "to do" list the example they used at that time also?

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

#147

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

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…

SOS.. i just got it.

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

#148

Post by getnormality »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #145
sfblah wrote: post #137

I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can emulate. But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are…

Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.

So are you saying that bad programmers play a dual role of attending meetings to get business requirements, in a way that AI cannot do?

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

#149

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

getnormality wrote: post #148
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.

So are you saying that bad programmers play a dual role of attending meetings to get business requirements, in a way that AI cannot do?

I am saying, having seen stuff implemented that simply does not make sense to anyone with an understanding of the actual situation on the ground, yes. And the funny thing is, it is not even an llm issue. This is a very, very human issue.

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

#150

Post by foo42 »

tkel wrote: post #39
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.

I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
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