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Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

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

#31

Post by system2 »

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…

The gap is closing; a shitty wannabe programmer will eventually learn the structures one way or another. Agentic coding just got many new people involved, and these new people create noise.

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

#32

Post by vanh4lt »

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…

Agree. Also, there is a lot fog at the moment. AI generates more code, we need a lot of markdowns now to teach it how to write "good code"... and . But at the end... a programmer has to take ownership of that code and responsibility, meaning: reading A LOT of code and/or coding more code.

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

#33

Post by Maxatar »

al_borland wrote: post #29
Maxatar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an absolutely phenomenal sales pitch to executives. A ton of automation is sold on the basis that it's probably not going to be as good as having a dedicated person do it, but that automation leads to much lower maintenance scales better, is more deterministic and reproducible.

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

#34

Post by system2 »

wseqyrku wrote: post #8

Remember you had to quit social media to keep your sanity in check? Ok, now AI. Same thing.

Not the same thing. Developers' clients are being approached by thousands of people instead of a handful. It creates the illusion that everyone can do the same thing for cheaper.

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

#35

Post by lyu07282 »

There was a reddit thread earlier very similar some interesting comments there too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ueidyv/softwar...

> I had an interview where I was asked the obligatory “what’s your Al workflow” and I said I use it for searching documentation and writing small functions or boilerplate that are tedious. Then I was asked whether I use Cursor. I said no, and immediately was told that “I’d be a better programmer if I used Cursor”. I have 13 years of software engineering experience, and was talked down by an Al startup with no minimal viable prototype. Then I was told I did not have the experience for the role. I love this timeline so much

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

#38

Post by LaundroMat »

al_borland wrote: post #29
Maxatar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision"

-- Internal IBM training manual, 1979

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

#39

Post by claytongulick »

I think the genie gets put back in the bottle, at least partly.

I don't think the future is massive data centers running at a staggering loss to generate questionable code.

The future is rethinking IDEs to have local models work in partnership with the developer to ease tedium and catch mistakes.

A model that maintains a visual, zoomable mind-map of the entire project, with two way binding. Code can be created visually or textually, same with data flows.

Project structure and architecture are presented in high-level ways, that can be easily altered and refactored with almost zero tedium.

I think we start using AI for what it's good for: pattern matching and transformation, and stop trying to make it reason and pretend like it's a human.

Once we, as an industry, figure this out we'll unlock a massive boost in quality and productivity, but it looks like there will be some painful times ahead before everyone realizes that the token extrusion machines are only increasing the total cost of ownership, and they are being used incorrectly when we try to outsource our thinking to them.

I think there's an enormous opportunity to build these tools right now, and that whoever nails it will win.

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

#40

Post by Groxx »

Low-skill work that used to be outsourced will go to cheaper LLMs, unless wages are depressed enough / running costs are high enough to keep using humans as cogs in the machine. This will also consume a ton of small-scale things, like personal-sized automation and small-business customization of better-crafted things (stuff that normally wouldn't be paid for in the first place, or only extremely rarely). Some will obviously exist, because paying someone else to farm out a ton of mediocre output with LLMs is still worthwhile sometimes, but it's going to be gutted as a general statement.

Especially with prototyping-style work, LLMs are clearly good enough for a ton of business-oriented proof-of-concepts, and that line of work is essentially dead. Unfortunately a lot of mid-tier art falls into this category as well, particularly because execs very clearly can't tell good art from bad (on a "customers like this" scale, with functionality being the judge, which is fairly objective. not a subjective "this is good art").

High-skill work is still necessary, but it's hard to tell if it's actually going to be more important (because skill is obviously still needed for actually-good results, and I honestly see no evidence that this will change with current tech) or less (primarily due to less demand, and it being significantly harder for non-skilled to judge skill when everyone can prototype something seemingly-impressive in a weekend). Some will very obviously continue to exist though.

Whether this means "high-skill people are going to be fine, stay the course" or "right now or looking for a new line of work" is... much less clear.

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