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Learning to code is still worthwhile

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Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#161

Post by tetha »

llama052 wrote: post #104
p1necone wrote: post #26

Anecdotally, the people who I know who were not particularly good developers pre-llms still manage to produce bad code even using flagship models now. I think having solid knowledge/understanding of good architecture and general practices is still crucial, and it's easy to forget that the foundational knowledge and instinct you take for granted now actually took a lot of time and effort to learn when you were less ex…

100% this. I observe this all the time. LLMs can be a force multiplier but those who don’t ask the right questions or understand the nuance still produce bad code, it’s just amplified. I don’t think any of the current models can avoid that, especially when it’s based on data it’s been fed, which is historically human generated.

And interestingly, a few good people at work are learning faster with the LLMs at hand.

To a degree, it looks like LLMs help them overcome the blank page anxiety and help them with the grunt work of, well, actually writing code, which actually contains a lot of technical nuances to keep track of. But once that's down, I'm having very good discussions with them on what makes good, maintainable and sustainable code bases.

It's almost like the old writing advice my Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” It's easier to dislike a part of something existing and fix that, than trying to create the perfect thing at once.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#162

Post by alightsoul »

prettyblocks wrote: post #138
taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

Yes, if you're just going down a list of jira tickets and implementing product features, but for many folks it's also an art medium.

It's like the purpose of portraits before photographs were invented. Maybe ai is like the camera for the photograph, and the canvas for portraits is writing code.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#163

Post by gyulai »

I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#164

Post by alightsoul »

ekidd wrote: post #65

As 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…

Well I guess this is highly location dependent. Outside western countries where ai is not acceptable, https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report ai has driven up demand for software.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#165

Post by tkocmathla »

Animats wrote: post #73
ekidd wrote: post #65

As 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…

> As 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. Not wrong. Probably. I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good…

> I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint.

This sounds to me like a life well lived!

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#166

Post by kerridge0 »

yowlingcat wrote: post #133
taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

I kinda like the music comparison because it's so rich with sociological analogues. You have the gear snobs who can't stop buying more premium gear but never sit down and write anything. The kids who pick up a copy of Garageband and put together hits with their natural talent, sense of taste and and interesting story to tell. Soundtrack and videogame composers who have hybrid instincts of session musicians and archit…

You also have people who just like bangers and love throwing some tracks together, like to create sets or playlists, think they might be a DJ one day, to move the crowd, no time/inclination in making music per se but care about the created experience and will learn the 'plumbing' if they have to....

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#167

Post by HNisCIS »

infinitebit wrote: post #153

Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra? Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician. I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or…

I take the opposite view but to the same conclusion. I've heard the joke "the more advanced you get the worse you get at math" from a lot of mathematicians. I'd bet most mathematicians can't do a long division problem without having to think pretty hard about it, because they've long since moved past that skill.

All that said, people still learn and do manual math at all levels in order to advance the field even though calculators and python notebooks exist.

I think people get too wrapped up in LLMs being the entirety of the future when the LLMs themselves are entirely a product of the past. An LLM is less a thinking machine than a lossy JPEG for language and to an extent, knowledge represented in language. As such, if you want to expand the field and move into the future you aren't going to rely solely on an algorithm that reverts to the mean.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#168

Post by alightsoul »

irjustin wrote: post #122
StilesCrisis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.

For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue. LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a care…

There's an increasing amount of jobs where the job role is analyst but you're just feeding the ai with whatever the task assigned to you was. These are not software jobs but are business jobs. Like User acceptance testing quality assurance aka bureaucracy

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#169

Post by alightsoul »

chii wrote: post #158
glouwbug wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't because we're not committing prompts. The analogous would be compiling to and then committing unmaintainable assembly when the higher level language, which is a deterministic compiler, already exists

> not committing prompts. nothing prevents people from committing their prompts. I've started seeing prompts being committed into repos, or at least as part of the commit message. In any case, if in the future there's a prompt specific language, it would be committed. I dont think we've reached there yet, but i dont doubt this is on the path to the future.

I posted a while ago about connecting an LLM directly to an assembler and people thought it was a bad idea. Now we're going in exactly that direction

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#170

Post by gyulai »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #143
taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter.

> The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter.

The thing is that programming was one of those rare crafts/arts, where you could have your cake and eat it too: Since you were writing all the code by hand, and since that process takes a fair bit of time anyway, you might as well write good code at no extra cost (which is where the artisanship comes in). Now the difference between good code and cheap code that does the same thing is the difference between 2 months of hand-crafting code and micromanaging LLMs versus an afternoon of vibing, and that is much less defensible from a business point-of-view.

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