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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?

#111

Post by tedmiston »

al_borland wrote: post #14
thisoneisreal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really fun philosophical exercise to ask what it means for them to be "wrong." My perspective is that they are fantastic at association and generalization (of language and symbols in particular), but whether they're identifying the associations you care about or generalizing to the level of abstraction you're aiming for is a complete crapshoot. If you aren't checking and correcting them, and discarding the mis…

One area where I feel safe saying they are “wrong”, rather than just going with a different assumption that was left unsaid, would be when it makes up API endpoints. It sees the general pattern in an API, then makes up an endpoint that sounds good, follows the pattern, but isn’t actually implemented. I’ve also seen a lot of issues with co-workers using an LLM to write their readme files. I look at the readme for what…

> One area where I feel safe saying they are “wrong”, rather than just going with a different assumption that was left unsaid, would be when it makes up API endpoints. It sees the general pattern in an API, then makes up an endpoint that sounds good, follows the pattern, but isn’t actually implemented.

I remember seeing this maybe 6+ months ago, but using paid plans, RAG, and a high thinking mode has eliminated a ton (almost all) of those kinds of hallucinations. Open models and free tiers are not there yet though.

> I’ve also seen a lot of issues with co-workers using an LLM to write their readme files. I look at the readme for what return values I should get, go to use them, and get an error. I check the code, and sure enough, none of the variables in the readme exist. The LLM just through they sounded good. Things like this I would say are pretty objectively wrong.

LLMs don't co-sign the quality of PRs though — your coworkers do. It's not unusual for docs to get oudated and not be maintained enough in small codebases, but that's not an LLM specific problem.

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

#112

Post by frankzero »

I must be honest, but I have started doing the same thing to some degree. Now this is for me in particular, I do know coding, but if the task at hand will take like 3 days and Claude can write and debug it in an hour, then I usually just run it by Claude. This is not to say I don't still code, because I still do, depending on the project, but I find myself relying on Claude a lot. I know this is counterintuitive to what you want to hear, but this is my reality. However, I still know a lot of people who still code with out the use of AI. So in my opinion the profession of programming will go down as AI progresses but will never die no matter how AI advances.

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

#113

Post by tedmiston »

titanomachy wrote: post #94
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.

> LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions ...

... by default.

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

#114

Post by tedmiston »

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 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.

For the current state of frontier models, you need to break the steps down so that the LLM understands a process like what you might go through as you expect it (which is often different for everyone).

i.e., get it to agree to a spec, then get it to agree to a build plan, agree on unit test signatures, UI etc as needed, then let it build, ...

"Prompt engineering"

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

#115

Post by tedmiston »

nbaksalyar wrote: post #85
cognitiveinline wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People keep saying things like > it's probably an issue with your usage of if > I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt > a skill/PEBKAC issue But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute. Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not fli…

What does a random bug in one LLM's frontend app have to do with learning how to do prompt engineering well?

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

#116

Post by tedmiston »

frankzero wrote: post #112

I must be honest, but I have started doing the same thing to some degree. Now this is for me in particular, I do know coding, but if the task at hand will take like 3 days and Claude can write and debug it in an hour, then I usually just run it by Claude. This is not to say I don't still code, because I still do, depending on the project, but I find myself relying on Claude a lot. I know this is counterintuitive to w…

The adoption curve across companies and industries is highly variable right now. Tech moves fast but plenty of boring industries need software but don't move on the bleeding edge of tech / LLMs / etc.

Even in the discourse here, you can see people getting variable quality of results and variable skepticism, some of which is valid, but a lot of it reads more like not having spent time really understanding prompt engineering.

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

#117

Post by stealthyllama »

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…

Even if / when it does work, the value being produced is reduced to the dollars paid to Anthropic or OpenAI or whoever. What are you even contributing? What’s stopping the ai provider from coming in and eating your lunch?

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

#119

Post by jdlshore »

montfort wrote: post #102
jdlshore wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifi…

Yeah, your experience is definitely different than mine. When I’m working with human teams, I don’t spend weeks giving them thousands of lines of precise instructions. We work incrementally, having fairly brief conversations to make sure we’re on the same page about the tasks we’re tackling, and then letting individual pairs work out the details of each task… which they do, because they’re experienced professionals.

For example, the project we were working on was to add support for reading a session cookie to a codebase that, up until now, had used a different kind of auth. Fairly straightforward, everybody knows what a session cookie is and how it works. In about 10 minutes, we decided on the big picture design elements (how it was going to fit into our existing system, what we needed to add/modify, etc.) and the corresponding tasks.

One of the things we wanted was an “UntrustedCookie” class to represent the cookie. It was meant to follow a pattern we had already established for other user-controlled input. Our HttpServerRequest object was going have a new getCookie() method that returned it.

This would have been about 30 min of work for a pair to implement, including tests. It’s pretty trivial. No further documentation is needed.

Anyway, I’m glad AI is working for you. My experience is that it often fails, and does so in ways that experienced humans don’t.

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