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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?

#91

Post by jdlshore »

montfort wrote: post #62
jdlshore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Sorry, I have to disagree. People often react to criticisms of AI with “but people also make mistakes,” but that’s a whataboutism fallacy.

The statement was that AI is as good as the “best human programmer” and it’s quite obvious that it’s not. It makes inhuman mistakes on a regular basis because it’s not using human thinking. Blaming those mistakes on poor management is just sweeping the problems under the rug.

I don’t know the best way to work with AI, but I do know that we’ll only discover the best way if we’re honest about its capabilities. That includes not pretending it’s as good as the best human programmers.

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

#92

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

.

   151 "profession" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
   profession
   n 1: the body of people in a learned occupation; "the news spread rapidly through the medical profession"; "they formed a community of scientists"
   2: an occupation requiring special education (especially in the liberal arts or sciences)
   3: an open avowal (true or false) of some belief or opinion; "a profession of disagreement" [syn: {profession}, {professing}]
   4: affirmation of acceptance of some religion or faith; "a profession of Christianity"
Does programming require special education

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

#93

Post by titanomachy »

lelanthran wrote: post #63
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 fro…

Who hires “pure solution modelers”? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone like that.

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

#94

Post by titanomachy »

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…

The electricity cost per unit of machine “reasoning” is vastly less than the cost of salary for human reasoning. That’s a weak argument. You should focus on the second part… LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions, and the complexity they introduce has a cost.

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

#95

Post by ex-aws-dude »

lelanthran wrote: post #63
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 fro…

It’s still lower level than a business analysis though so it’s not the same

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

#96

Post by tavavex »

themgt wrote: post #71
schmookeeg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iunno, I feel like being born in a first world country did most of that "top 0.1% of the world" work. That sentence works the same with and without AI/LLMs. Among peers, I feel like I am top 20%? 30%? maybe, by being a good programmer who is adept at agents. A year ago was the 0.1% point, this stuff is spreading like wildfire. A year from now I think it's going to just be de rigeur that these are our tools now. Worse…

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Maybe if only you ran a little faster, you'd outpace the rapid advancement of automation! There's fewer jobs now? Malnourish yourself until you're a running skeleton to get that speed advantage. More people competing for the same opportunities? You can't afford breaks anymore, just run, day and night, doesn't matter where, move. Thousands of people still outpacing than you despite all this? A true self-starter strives to dedicate their whole life, their existence to competition, you must give everything short of death to reach the coveted peaks of temporary employment.

Is this the world you're excited to be living in?

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

#97

Post by ex-aws-dude »

Groxx wrote: post #40

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 ob…

It’s like how google translate replaced the low end but we still have human translators for high end stuff

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

#100

Post by mejutoco »

high_byte wrote: post #53

code is like assembly now. in the olden days (pre-LLMs) we would write high-level code. the entire layer was high-level code and rarely would we ever need to peak into the assembly: writing, debugging, architecting, reviewing, testing - all were done in the high-level language layer. --- welcome to present day: since we don't write code - we write intents, we also shouldn't review code either - we should review inten…

> I ask the agent to generate markdown docs, graphviz diagrams, changelogs, audit reports, etc. I only review that.

From an alternative perspective, that is the code.

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