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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?

#101

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

I saw this, all of this happening years before ChatGPT existed, but with outsourcing to Indian dev shops.

You'd be shocked how often I see the meat-space equivalent of vibe coding!

"I trust the developers."

"You really shouldn't!"

The thing to realise is that there is no fundamental difference between outsourcing a development task to other human developers versus outsourcing[1] it to LLMs.

Either way, total and complete understanding is being sacrificed in the name of productivity and scalability.

It's just there's one extra layer of work assignment now, with ICs handing off tasks to agents.

What this has revealed to ICs is the BIG issue that has plagued all software development for decades, especially since outsourcing became so popular: Oversight is critical, and more importantly: authority can be delegated, but responsibility cannot.

LLM output is fine, as long as you review everything it does.

This is the same as any competent dev team manager reviewing PRs for quality, paying attention to critical matters such as security, adherence to high level design and low-level style standards, etc.

Some do.

Many never did.

[1] This doesn't have to be a contract with an overseas provider, by "outsourcing" I mean any variant of not-your-own-hands-on-keyboard. Any scenario where a customer or manager assigns tasks to developers other than themselves.

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

#102

Post by montfort »

jdlshore wrote: post #91
montfort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

I suppose our opinions stem from different experiences. I don't expect AI to do all the work with just a paragraph of instructions. Some people do, and they get very poor results. I design large, complex systems based on microservices, and so far I haven't encountered any of the obvious and glaring errors that other users report. For each project, I've spent two or three weeks working on thousands of lines of specification documents, user stories, plans, and task lists, using DDD. My prompts consist of dozens of files with 10,000-20,000 lines in total. Because the implementation tasks are extensive and atomic, AI has worked very well for me in solving them.

My experience shows that AI can program like the best programmers; its code is very good when given precise instructions, just like a human. I've encountered problems elsewhere, such as anti-patterns in unwired modules, which are "large-scale" implementation errors. I'm resolving these thanks to an open source tool I'm building for AI cognitive governance, and it's yielded excellent results for me. The code produced at both small and large scales is high quality.

In my experience, people experiencing gross AI errors are doing so because they aren't giving it precise instructions. And by precise instructions, I don't mean a highly refined prompt or "vibe-coding"; I'm talking about instructions thousands of lines long, just like the ones we create when developing with human teams.

If two people are using the same model, and one reports that the AI "neglected to handle a case where a database could have multiple rows with the same ID", while the other says they can develop a huge microservices system with multiple databases without any major issues, perhaps one of them isn't using the tool optimally, based on my experience.

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

#104

Post by stuaxo »

sshine wrote: post #54
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…

> little to no automated tests I'm still amazed people don't achieve extremely high test quality, since you get tests "for free" now. One of the limitations of testing were always that people "design" things so they're hard to test. And then they argue "This can't be tested", or "Refactoring this for testing is not worth it." It is now. Yet, I work on codebases with no tests and lots of yolo co-authoring.

You get quantity of tests, but the tests are not good quality by default, at all.

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

#106

Post by _doctor_love »

What you're describing sounds like what many people in the industry are doing, and likely what most AI-adopters are doing. It scales until it falls apart.

The responsible and professional way to actually make AI work at scale is to build a dark factory. (You can search HN for a lot of good resources, start with Simon Willison and StrongDM)

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

#107

Post by throwaw12 »

_doctor_love wrote: post #106

What you're describing sounds like what many people in the industry are doing, and likely what most AI-adopters are doing. It scales until it falls apart. The responsible and professional way to actually make AI work at scale is to build a dark factory. (You can search HN for a lot of good resources, start with Simon Willison and StrongDM)

I really didn't get it, how is dark factory better than vibe coding whole day and not looking at code?

If dark factory indeed worked, shouldn't StrongDM print a new unicorn startup every month?

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

#108

Post by stuaxo »

softwaredoug wrote: post #90

Every AI coding project feels like working with legacy code. All the skills I actually use look more like managing a big messy, brittle black box codebase. It’s exactly how we would have inherited a big ugly codebase pre AI. I think if you’re used to traditional green field development, and have never owned legacy code AI software engineering can be bewildering. If, however, you’ve been stuck maintaining legacy code,…

This sounds kinda of horrible ?

I'd rather build things slower (perhaps with an LLMs help at times) that understandable and high quality.

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

#109

Post by purple-leafy »

No one knows so just embrace it :)

LLM capabilities are mind-blowing.

I’m not a super experienced engineer career-wise ~5 years, so take my view with a grain of salt - but I’ve done work in full-stack, systems, gaming, extensions (web and ide), low level languages including assembly, and a small amount of embedded.

I spend almost all my spare time coding. And have done so for the last 5 years. So I consider myself capable of bringing most projects to fruition.

I roll my eyes when people say “AI sucks” “AI isn’t better than me” “AI doesn’t speed me up” - it’s either a load of shit, delusion, cope, high-horsing, or they are a Luddite.

I’m sorry but the rate at which I can work pre-AI and post-AI is insane (when not limited by bureaucracy). Yes the outputs and code can be terrible, but I can prototype 10 ideas in the time it would take me in the past to prototype 1.

However most of the LLMs approaches are fucking terrible, it gets it working but it’s pure spaghetti and I do all the architecture and usually most of the code. But I prototype ideas with AI. Like if you actually use performance monitoring and memory monitoring tools, LLMs have no fucking clue what they are doing and make slow bloated buggy shit.

But it’s great for blueprinting.

Who’s to say it won’t also be great at implementing too? I think it will be.

But for now it requires guidance and orchestration and I mostly use it to test concepts.

I did my first purely vibe coded completely hands off project the other week and loved the results! It was just for fun.

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

#110

Post by vitally3643 »

Seems clear that the age of everyone and their dog getting a programming gig for easy money is coming to a close. What will be left (for the foreseeable future) is positions for very highly skilled software engineers who actually know the craft well enough to make good use of AI.

The industry is going to shift from hiring as many programmers as you can afford to hiring a small number of the best engineers you can find. AI can't replace an engineer's skill and insight, and I have yet to see signs that LLMs are fundamentally capable of such a thing. What is screamingly obvious however is that when a highly skilled engineer learns how to drive AI agents, that's when you get true effort multiplication. A real engineer can leverage AI in ways that an unskilled vibe coder simply cannot, because it turns out that building a house still requires engineering even when you have a nail gun. LLMs can write code all day but if you don't understand programming and engineering on your own, you lack fundamental tools to build software.

Sorry kids, buffet is closed. No more FAANG salaries for anyone with a pulse and a copy of VSCode. The future of the industry looks to lie with a vastly smaller number of much more highly skilled engineers.

What happens when those engineers age out and we realize we stopped training new ones? I genuinely fear for the coming generations of engineers. It's not going to be good.

I recommend you learn to weld instead.

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