Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

ivanturkovic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 246 posts

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

#151

Post by getnormality »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #149
getnormality wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is the actual work of programming is mostly just sitting in meetings where business people and programmers slowly muddle through requirements?

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

#152

Post by danhau »

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…

Thanks for chiming in. I appreciate your comments on my young views.

What do you make of AI?

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

#153

Post by BobBagwill »

The potentially cool thing about LLM's is bootstrapping. No matter how much COBOL you wrote, COBOL didn't get better. LLM's can be used to make LLM's (and other software stuff) better. LLM's could be used to create their successor(s).

Of course, in the end, it won't do us humans any good, because when the Singularity AKA Rapture comes, we'll all be converted to Computronium. :-)

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

#154

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

getnormality wrote: post #151
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is the actual work of programming is mostly just sitting in meetings where business people and programmers slowly muddle through requirements?

The actual work happens in the head. I suspect you know this. Now, there is a clear benefit to being able to flatten some of the issues related to coding, but do you really think, any of it can be done without those meetings and muddling through those requirements? At the very least, there needs to be one person that understands what is actually needed.

I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense, I half expect it. I will be very subtle, I don't believe the issue lies with the tooling ( AI or not ).

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

#155

Post by bdcravens »

The market however has done a pretty good job of it, especially when it's a developer bull market that suddenly shifts directions. Case in point: late 90s, the mad rush to put warm bodies in chairs for those who could even spell HTML. A few years later, many had left and gone back to selling cars or whatever they did before.

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

#156

Post by getnormality »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #154
getnormality wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the actual work of programming is mostly just sitting in meetings where business people and programmers slowly muddle through requirements?

The actual work happens in the head. I suspect you know this. Now, there is a clear benefit to being able to flatten some of the issues related to coding, but do you really think, any of it can be done without those meetings and muddling through those requirements? At the very least, there needs to be one person that understands what is actually needed. I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense, I half…

I spend an unusually small proportion of my life in meetings, probably an idiosyncratic feature of my job.

My impression is that the main reason most people have so many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking at everyone else with the expectation that they are working. But if you are not in a meeting, this expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at work and you don't need to work.

In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.

Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means someone could be watching you outside meetings, which causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises productivity.

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

#157

Post by Tanjreeve »

symfrog wrote: post #26
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…

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…

The amount of "apps" I've had dumped on my team that are everything from un-releasable to deployed on some random shit-cloud we haven't approved (vercel comes up a lot). If you needed hand holding to release things or had to throw software over the fence to others to "productionise" etc then you probably don't know what you're talking about.

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

#158

Post by Tanjreeve »

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…

For a brief blip in time the last few years it was possible to jump from a code camp to a decent paying job and vaguely disappear for a while like Milton from office space. The current period from a bad economy is more of a reversion to the mean.

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

#159

Post by aleph_minus_one »

danhau wrote: post #152
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for chiming in. I appreciate your comments on my young views. What do you make of AI?

> What do you make of AI?

Let me put it this way: I do have my opinion on this topic, but this whole topic is insanely multi-faceted, and some claims that I am rather certain about are more at the boundaru of the Overton window of HN, so I won't post it here.

But the article which the whole discussion is about

> https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-software-sim...

offers in my opinion a rather balanced perspective regarding using AI for coding (which does not mean that this article is near to my opinion).

I will just give some less controversial thoughts and advices concerning AI:

- A huge problem when discussing AI is that the whole topic is a hodgepodge of various very diverse topics.

- The (current) AI industry has invested a lot of marketing efforts to re-define what AI stood for in the past (it basically convinced the mass of people that "AI = what we are offering")

- I cannot say whether AI will be capable of replacing lots of people in office jobs or not (I have serious doubts). Media loves to disseminate this topic, but in my opinion it does not really matter: the agenda is rather to spread fear among employees to make them more obedient.

- Even if AI will be capable of replacing only few office workers (a scenario that I rather believe in), it does not mean that management will not use "AI"/"replace by AI" as a very convenient excuse to get rid of lots of employees. The dismissed workers will then mostly vent their spleen on the AI companies instead of the management; in other work: AI is a very convenient scapegoat for inconvenient management decisions. And yes, I consider it to be possible that some event that leads to mass layoffs might happen in a few years (but this is speculative).

- While I cannot say how much quality improvement is possible for current AI models (i.e. I don't know whether there exists a technological barrier), the signs are clear that as of today AI companies have hit some soft "cost barriers". I don't know whether these are easily solvable or not, but be aware of their existence.

- So, my advice is: if an AI model is of use for some project that you have (e.g. generating graphics/content for your web platform; using it as a tool for developing the next scientific breakthrough; ...), do it now. Don't assume that the models will do this nearly freely for you anymore in the future (it can be that this will stay possible in the possible, but be cautious).

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

#160

Post by BobBagwill »

If most programming is ShitWork ® and most programmers are performing ShitWork and LLM's are good at ShitWork, then most programmers are out of a job. If those programmers can pivot to another non-ShitWork or programming-adjacent function, they can remain employed.

There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].

Post reply on HN