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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#31

Post by drzaiusx11 »

suzzer99 wrote: post #9
soumyaskartha wrote: post #7

Every few years something is going to kill code and here we are. The job changes, it does not disappear.

For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.

This is already happening, many days I am that grumpy "code janitor" yelling at the damn kids to improve their slop after shit blows up in prod. I can tell you It's not "fun", but hopefully we'll converge on a scalable review system eventually that doesn't rely on a few "olds" to clean up. GenAI systems produce a lot of "mostly ok" code that has subtle issues you on catch with some experience.

Maybe I should just retire a few years early and go back to fixing cars...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#32

Post by pixl97 »

idopmstuff wrote: post #20
deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out. I would do the initial research/pl…

It's even better when you guide them into finding the fatal flaw for themselves.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#33

Post by rglover »

It's only dead to those who are ignorant to what it takes to build and run real systems that don't tip over all the time (or leak data, embroil you in extortion, etc). That will piss some people off but it's worth considering if you don't want to perma-railroad yourself long-term. Many seem to be so blinded by the glitz, glamour, and dollar signs that they don't realize they're actively destroying their future prospects/reputation by getting all emo about a non-deterministic printer.

Valuable? Yep. World changing? Absolutely. The domain of people who haven't the slightest clue what they're doing? Not unless you enjoy lighting money on fire.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#34

Post by drzaiusx11 »

gedy wrote: post #18

When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs... I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?". I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less cod…

Oh the memories, but at least that generated code was deterministic...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#35

Post by realusername »

justonceokay wrote: post #22
pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

Most art forms do not have a wildly changing landscape of materials and mediums. In software we are seeing things slow down in terms of tooling changes because the value provided by computers is becoming more clear and less reliant on specific technologies. I figure that all this AI coding might free us from NIH syndrome and reinventing relational databases for the 10th time, etc.

The bar to create the new X framework has just been lowered so I expect the opposite, even more churn.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#36

Post by andrei_says_ »

jedberg wrote: post #25
pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

People are doing this now. It's basically what skills.sh and its ilk are for -- to teach AIs how to do new things. For example, my company makes a new framework, and we have a skill we can point an agent at. Using that skill, it can one-shot fairly complicated code using our framework. The skill itself is pretty much just the documentation and some code examples.

The question is, who made the new framework? Was it vibe coded by someone who does not understand its code?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#37

Post by pklausler »

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

This would also mean that we should design new programming languages out of sight of LLMs in case we need to hide code from them.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#38

Post by CamperBob2 »

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies?

Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming.

Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand.

That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever supposed to evolve, doing the same old things the same old way for 50+ years. It's time for a real paradigm shift, and that's what we're seeing now.

All of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. It just needs to be refactored, reorganized, and repurposed, and that's a robot's job if there ever was one.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#39

Post by suzzer99 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #31
suzzer99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.

This is already happening, many days I am that grumpy "code janitor" yelling at the damn kids to improve their slop after shit blows up in prod. I can tell you It's not "fun", but hopefully we'll converge on a scalable review system eventually that doesn't rely on a few "olds" to clean up. GenAI systems produce a lot of "mostly ok" code that has subtle issues you on catch with some experience. Maybe I should just ret…

Yeah I imagine it has to be utterly thankless being the code janitor right now when all the hype around AI is peaking. You're basically just the grumpy troll slowing things down. And God forbid you introduce a regression bug trying to clean up some AI slop code.

Maybe in the future us olds will get more credit when apps fall over and the higher ups realize they actually need a high-powered cleaner/fixer, like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#40

Post by idopmstuff »

pixl97 wrote: post #32
idopmstuff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out. I would do the initial research/pl…

It's even better when you guide them into finding the fatal flaw for themselves.

Hahaha yes this is absolutely true but often times so much more work.
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