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

Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 206 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#21

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

stackghost wrote: post #11
retrac wrote: post #3

I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I ca…

> Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. This, to me, is the biggest differentiator. In terms of results, there's a huge yawning chasm between the person who says "Claude make me a $thing" versus the person who puts in the effort to lay down the overall architecture, gives some thoughts to libraries and dependencies, performan…

> Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important.

This was never important. The important part was always knowing when to use them.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#22

Post by ryanisnan »

fibonachos wrote: post #19

My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…

Spot on, in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#25

Post by [deleted] »

thisoneisreal wrote: post #9
al_borland wrote: post #5

> ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain This works, until it doesn’t. I’m continuously shocked by these stories, where so many people put the future of their job/company in the hands of these agents after only a few months of existing. I still constantly run into bad output from LLMs, from code to basic questions. I don’t understand how anyone can hand things over to something that is laughably wrong on a pr…

It's a really fun philosophical exercise to ask what it means for them to be "wrong." My perspective is that they are fantastic at association and generalization (of language and symbols in particular), but whether they're identifying the associations you care about or generalizing to the level of abstraction you're aiming for is a complete crapshoot. If you aren't checking and correcting them, and discarding the mis…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#26

Post by ecshafer »

What are you writing that Claude is actually writing all of it? Every time I get past the green field stage, I just end up throwing out what it writes half the time since its trash. Claude seems really great at fix this unit test, generate this boiler plate, take this uml and build this framework out. But when I am doing refactorings, or implementing things that are beyond monotonous, I end up writing it all by hand. My best luck is still do the design, query AI for possible choices, sketch out the framework of what I am writing, have AI critique my plan, and then have AI design individual methods, then fix what it writes.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#28

Post by cejast »

lrsaturnino wrote: post #12

I've posted a recent article about the future of software development https://saturnino.substack.com/p/out-of-the-loop?r=7eqhw&utm... Basically, in a decade or so, we'll be completely out of the loop in software development; even this title won't exist anymore (like the 2000's webmaster). We'll still be around, but with different roles.

For what it’s worth, I find comments and articles with assertive predictions like this difficult to take at face value.

I don’t even disagree with the premise, but it shifts the burden of assessing likelihood back onto the reader, so it doesn’t really add much value to me.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#29

Post by al_borland »

Maxatar wrote: post #17
al_borland wrote: post #5

> ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain This works, until it doesn’t. I’m continuously shocked by these stories, where so many people put the future of their job/company in the hands of these agents after only a few months of existing. I still constantly run into bad output from LLMs, from code to basic questions. I don’t understand how anyone can hand things over to something that is laughably wrong on a pr…

There's nothing shocking about this. The vast majority of software/source code is pretty terrible anyways, code that is full of bugs, slow to use, has little to no automated tests and very hard to maintain. To the extent that it gets fixed or works at all, it's not because of competent developers doing rigorous analysis of the software, it's because either someone testing it or using it gets annoyed, reports an issue…

AI is no good, but neither are people, isn’t a great sales pitch.

I think for small tools that people want to make for themselves, that’s great. Where I see a problems are when other people and money get involved. If something goes wrong, who is accountable? Claude wrote it, Claude reviewed it, Claude submitted the PR… yet Claude can’t have any real accountability.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#30

Post by montfort »

The profession has already changed. For the past eight months, AI has been competent enough to code like the best human programmer, but strangely, the software isn't any better yet. Everyone has lost sight of what the profession truly is. It's not just about coding; it's about software engineering. Our role is no longer that of programmers, AI has taken over that role. Our role is that of engineers who manage programming agents. Every attempt to have AI develop a medium-to-large project fails because the goal is to solve everything with a magic four-line prompt. We're forgetting the structural aspect, the engineering side. We must treat the tool as just that: a tool. The direction and responsibility remain in our hands. It's not about reviewing the code line by line; it's about ensuring that the product faithfully represents a well-planned engineering intent. That's why the concept of AI-augmented Software Engineering is so important.
Post reply on HN