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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?

#61

Post by linzhangrun »

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…

Using today's model prices as a rebuttal is a very weak argument.

Two years ago, SOTA was gpt-o1, and it was much more expensive than Fable. Now, for $4,699, you can easily run a much smarter Qwen3.6-35B locally with DGX Spark.

Think about where we are. This is an era where a new SOTA arrives every two months. It took LLMs only about 18 months to go from chain-of-thought reasoning to disproving the unit-distance conjecture. chatGPT itself is only three and a half years old.

DeepSeek V4, released two months ago, is almost as cheap as the electricity costed, has the ability to being absolutely a top-tier model in 2025 standards.

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

#62

Post by montfort »

jdlshore wrote: post #49
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 i…

I understand your point, but what you're describing is exactly the kind of mistake even the best human programmer could make in a poorly managed environment. I'm concerned that since AI emerged, we've overestimated our programming abilities. The comparisons we make between our own work and AI are based on an assumption of absolute perfection that doesn't exist in reality. Bugs aren't an invention of AI; they're ours. All modern software engineering, testing systems, version control systems, and so on, were developed through years of dealing with our own mistakes. We don't make systems fault-tolerant by understanding that failures are external to our work. These failures are our doing, and now they're AI's doing too. We have to deal with applying to those agents the management that we previously applied among ourselves. The example you provide is very good, because you yourself, with your human mind that solves problems, suspect that the origin of the problem was poor communication, and you are very likely right, but just as if it were a human error, the programmer is responsible for their faulty code, but you are responsible for poor process management, and yes, the same applies to working with AI agents.

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

#63

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.

The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part.

If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved from dev to BA.

> Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load.

I've found that the act of physically writing refines my understanding a lot more than simply reading.

We don't typically expect a person to read a trigonometry textbook and then perform well on an exam. They have to drill problems to surface their misunderstandings to themselves.

My fear is that, with developers adopting your approach, they're "designing" systems in much the same way that a read-the-book-only trigonometry student solves trigonometry problems.

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

#64

Post by Braini »

Its similar for us to a certain extent. I honestly don‘t know yet where this will lead to. Personally I also don‘t really follow the arguments that the agent does the coding and the human does the understanding. In my opinion one is thinking differently about the code when not coding it by himself, on a higher level or lets even say a more superficial one. To keep the understanding on the same level you would have to limit the agent to just „typing“ but this is definitely not whats happening.

Yes, may be a skill issue[tm], may be an inherent one or it may not even be relevant anymore, we will see.

For me it currently still works well because I am working on legacy systems I more or less have a good understanding about - so I can judge the agent code. Not sure how this will be with new, green field code.

Not even starting with the discussion how it should be possible to review the sheer amounts of generated code.

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

#65

Post by lelanthran »

fullstackchris wrote: post #47

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.

> But do you think a carpenter considers himself "one who screws nails" or "glues joints"?

Sure, but a carpenter who is unable to use a screwdriver without hurting themselves is unlikely to produce robust furniture with a a powered driver.

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

#66

Post by AlanAAG »

From my experience, Ai right now is not perfect and people still treat it as if it was, leaked secrets, create 10 bugs to solve one minor issue, whole backend a mess that won’t resist at scale. Even though it is improving and all this issues will disappear, Ai will take over most of the technical hurdle, what will be left?

Materializing and scoping down broad idea ( or just abstract vision ) into what needs to be built, it’s not the same to say.

“Hey Claude build me a fitness app”

Thank actually understanding your customer behind it, the behaviour and psychology, the journey and what is the actual problem you’re solving.

Tech in general and programming emerged as a need to create new things in a digital world to solve our problems, building them just got easier but understanding the problems and the people behind them, that’s gonna be an increasingly necessary task

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

#67

Post by cognitiveinline »

ecshafer wrote: post #26

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.…

What you say could be theoretically possible, but it's probably an issue with your usage of if. For eg: if any of this hard non-promptable project is available on github, or you've seen this problem in any large scale github project, you can share that. I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt.

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

#68

Post by cognitiveinline »

luckman212 wrote: post #4

For the last 6 decades or so, a computer was a machine assumed to operate with high levels of precision and deterministic outputs. Such precision enabled spacecraft like Voyager 1 & 2 to travel billions of miles from Earth, staying on course, semi-operational and sending telemetry- 50 years after launch. Now we have machines that, when asked to produce a paperclip, may instead produce a butter knife, or a banana, or…

This is cope. sota agents produces what's asked exactly, usually it's the asking that's the problem not the result, improve the prompt and the output drastically improves.

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

#69

Post by sshine »

> it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding

To me it felt like there were always engineers and vibers.

Vibers don't work systematically, never test, accept unknown regression, don't use git, and if they do, treat it like Dropbox, use terrible languages, have terrible habits. Vibers got a new tool, too, and it vastly increases the amount of slop. But the slop was always there.

The slop actually got better after vibers stopped writing their own slop, I have to say.

And vibers are less defensive about the particular slop they didn't write themselves.

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