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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?

#41

Post by [deleted] »

vanh4lt wrote: post #32
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.

[deleted]

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

#42

Post by appplication »

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.

I think small tools people make for themselves is realistically less than 1% of software produced. Most of the code, and - to the GP’s point - bad code, is produced in corporations with plenty of money and budget.

There is just such a tremendous amount of waste at every company, in that the headcount and software expands to fill the budget. I’m not defending Elon, but look at how much he slashed from X (80% or so?) and the company still has its core product functioning and an active user base.

There is a ton of software (especially internal) at essentially every company that also is low accountability before Claude. “Oh Ted built that but he’s working on a new important project. I understand it’s broken and that’s impacting you but we won’t be able to prioritize this until next quarter at least. Can you set up a meeting next month to discuss?”

Honestly the outcome for all of these LLMs is indeed is likely a higher amount of software with no accountability, but it’s also an improved ability to juggle more of that software to the same (realistically low) standard.

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

#43

Post by stackghost »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #21
stackghost wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>The important part was always knowing when to use them.

Two things can be true simultaneously. I think there was a time when deep familiarity with implementing algorithms was important.

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

#44

Post by cadamsdotcom »

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…

> hobby projects

Unfortunately despite being impressive for solo stuff, such results don’t scale to software you’d give to others.

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

#45

Post by moezd »

That's maybe wishful thinking from my part, but more towards like other engineering fields: Project engineers design it from scratch, everyone must speak architecture, customer and compliance at once, and we will have standards and "codes" drawn up by the end of this decade.

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

#46

Post by fibonachos »

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…

Responding to my own comment to add that I think this moment favors the curious and passionate. None of what I wrote above is a complaint. I’m having more fun now than I have in a long time.

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

#47

Post by fullstackchris »

My profession is not, and never was, _programmer_. Lines of code—the actual text, is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I'll take heat for that here for sure. But do you think a carpenter considers himself "one who screws nails" or "glues joints"? No, the small minutiae of the job was never the job itself.

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

#48

Post by jeremyjh »

pyeri wrote: post #2

I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reason…

> Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues

This is cope. There are multiple open models that are already good enough and cheap enough at API rates to sustain this.

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

#49

Post by jdlshore »

montfort wrote: post #30

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 program…

> AI has been competent enough to code like the best human programmer

It’s really not. Opus 4.8 can’t produce good software design and it still makes straightforward implementation mistakes. Two errors it made in one day for me recently: it built the Cookie class I asked for without a name field—cookies have a name and a value—and it neglected to handle a case where a database could have multiple rows with the same id, just returning whatever came back first.

The “best human programmers” absolutely would not have made those mistakes. At worst, they would have asked if I really meant what they thought I meant.

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

#50

Post by themgt »

I will just say, if you are any good at programming and have experience using agents, you're in the top 0.1% of the world in adoption of a critical new technology.

It may seem hopeless as a programmer, but imo you'd be much better off reframing your situation re: the above sentence.

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