"Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music" Um no, you've gone too far.
Roller Coaster Tycoon was programmed in fucking assembly. That's a work of artistry right there.
Learning to code is still worthwhile
81–90 of 326 posts
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how one would build anything without knowing. If it was true, I would be building a competitor to Anthropic right now.
You build without knowing by delegating to a system that extrapolates what it knows about you and what you want, and is able to execute on that to deliver faster, better, and more completely than you ever could. You'll live as a ball of intent and values, observing in wonder as everything you desire springs up around you before you know you want it. You could choose not to live like this of course, but it would be li…
I assume you don't ascribe to the thought that friction leads to growth. In this future of complete frictionless existence wont humanity stagnate? In this world of no effort, nothing has meaning.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#83The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s. The layperson may be able to get ahold of a spellbook, but without Understanding it comes with high risk of turning your niece into a frog. Whereas Wizards can cast increasingly powerful spells that build on each other, and make Art.
And that worked for maybe, what... half a decade? But eventually the Illuminators all transitioned to being Arcane Scribes, the cost of spells plummeted due to increased supply, and in the end only Wizards who had invested in Arcane Sanctums had anything to show for it 50 years later.
Real Estate, it always boils down to real estate.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#84Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc. All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.
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Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#85As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they we…
Yeah. I’ve been saying that for a while (and switched fields entirely.) People were getting hung up on the idea that an LLM could not truly replace a developer, and that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. For the job market to be severely impacted, you just need to reduce the number of people required to do the parts of the job that LLMs suck at, and that only requires increased efficiency for existing developers. Even if your average developer is a measly 30% more efficient, that might create 20% less demand for developers, which would have a giant impact on demand, which would have a giant impact on wages for those still employed.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#86Perhaps coding will be optional rather than a requirement for the most in-demand tech jobs. But for roles including AI Engineer, someone who knows how to code will have a premium over an AI Engineer that only vibes.
While the peak of "learning to code" is surely in the past, there is resentment (at least in my personal experience) that's fueling the "anti-learning to code". Personally, it was very frustrating when learning how to program and I gave up many times before finally getting it. In general, when people cannot obtain competence in a certain area, they tend to disregard the importance of it to shield their ego. What's going on now in corporate are nasty politics because people who decided not to learn to code seek that the skill is disregarded entirely and even mocked.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#87> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music Something I'm trying to do right now is to build something and avoid using LLMs to write any code. I still use it to consult. I'm writing a Dota2 tournament match aggregator in Elixir that takes tournament streams and chronologically orders them in a format that makes it easier to watch them sequentially since I find YouTube hard to use…
> I want to build. It's human to want to build. Anything a human feels is human, regardless if it's to build or to not build :) Some people prefer some ways of building, others in other ways, it's all fine. I think lots of people forget that programming is a heavily creative endeavor in the end. If I wanted to be slightly controversial, I'd argue building a program is more like painting a painting than building a bri…
Interesting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building.
I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day.
It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it.
Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#88It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail. The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they repl…
Where do these new top notch programmers come from and what proof of top notchness will be required for job proof?
(Honest questions)
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#89Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't AI agents replacing the coding mostly being done on the outer layers of development? I mean, end user applications, apps, dashboards, business applications? On this "outer crust" people can maybe tolerate things with 99% accuracy, or bloated code. A vibe coded app can be argued to be "good enough." (Even then, look at the disaster that Microsoft apps have become post AI adop…
There are ways to do it correctly. You just end up spending a lot of time conceptualizing and refining abstractions. To me the issue is more that conceptualizing requires a certain state of mind. Before llms it was 10% hard thinking 90% implementing. Implementation was actually sort of a reward, it felt so good just being in the zone and fleshing out ideas. Post llms I find myself walking up and down quite a lot, onl…
I wonder what the rates of burnout are going to look like in a couple of years, if this is the future
Talk about driving people off a cliff
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#90As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they we…
The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.
And thats why noone should learn to code.