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Learning to code is still worthwhile

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Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#301

Post by DrewADesign »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #155
DrewADesign wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

How much more efficient did compilers make developers?

Yeah that’s exactly the same if you completely ignore context and market dynamics. It’s like trying to use the patterns of the colonial American horse market as a vehicle to analyze the modern American auto industry.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#302

Post by Chaosvex »

ramesh31 wrote: post #253
gyulai wrote: post #163

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 pro…

>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 The concern for code quality has become increasingly unfounded. I have noticed over the last year or so that you can still tell when a codebase is 100% AI generated, but not because it is poorly written or disorganized, but that it is now dramatically better than any h…

Funny but also not true unless you have low standards, potentially as a result of just not being very good yourself.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#303

Post by fn-mote »

Zak wrote: post #284
cedws wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason LLMs seem powerful is that they can churn out the Nth variation of a CRUD app in minutes. But it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever independently develop a compiler for a truly novel programming language, for instance. They don’t have creativity. They are pattern generators.

> it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever independently develop a compiler for a truly novel programming language I did exactly that using an LLM. It may not count as independent depending on how strict you are about that, but then LLMs don't do anything independently . I wrote a small sample program and expected output, then told the LLM to write a compiler for it in C using LLVM. I subsequently told it to extend the lang…

My main argument about this kind of work is that it is (essentially if not exactly) in the training set.

I want a different argument before I believe that LLMs are doing “out of training dataspace creativity” (extrapolation not interpolation).

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#304

Post by DrewADesign »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #109
DrewADesign wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Did Object Oriented programming create less demand for developers?

Were the software and dev markets even remotely comparable in the 60s?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#305

Post by DrewADesign »

IshKebab wrote: post #159
drTobiasFunke wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the amount of work is finite, so more productive people implies fewer people are required. Is that the case though? Has it ever been?

The amount of work is not a fixed number, it's more of a supply/demand curve. Do we need 100 programs? Yes definitely! 10k? Yes. 1m? Probably. 100m? Uhm... 1bn? Probably not. So there will always be a point where people aren't willing to hire more software developers because there are enough already.

Considering the dev job market right now, lack of developers doesn’t seem to be a bottleneck for the industry.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#306

Post by fn-mote »

zingar wrote: post #214
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at a company with thousands of microservices, I feel like most of it is just a bunch of boilerplate riddled with tons of ridiculous business logic, security and otherwise bugs. It seems like people were historically more concerned about Java inheritance and spreading everything around different files and directory hierarchies, while ignoring common sense business requirements completely. With each servi…

The 1500 line react component that my unsupervised agentic coding side project produced says that it can get worse than we have now.

The difference is, if you tell the LLM that the component is too big and ask it to use some strategies to break it up, it will.

Humans? Also maybe, but I always suspect the humans actually don’t know a better way. The LLM does, just that pathway wasn’t activated.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#307

Post by Ferret7446 »

What is "learn to code"?

Is it learning the syntax of a programming language? Is it learning CS fundamentals? Is it learning OS fundamentals? Is it learning common tools and libraries? Is it learning programming paradigms? Is it learning how to read and debug code? Is it learning Java boilerplate? Is it learning an esoteric sequence of keystrokes to perform an edit in vim?

That last one I think has definitely been superceded by LLMs, and I say this as an ed user.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#308

Post by jplusequalt »

fragmede wrote: post #293
nullpoint420 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i always hear this argument. and then those that proclaim it get stuck for a sprint trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and then i get a ticket a month later because the customer reported the feature isn't working. all while they proclaim how much they care about the customer. i'm not just talking about one person. i feel as if there's an archetype of programmer that thinks like this.

I'm not sure what archetype my comment makes me fall under, but my point is people spend time and effort learning about the things that are important to them. The things that are important to them aren't important to you and I'm saying that being interested in how a CPU actually works doesn't make you better or smarter than them being interested in how other parts of the business work.

>spend time and effort learning about the things that are important to them

But Earlier ...

>Or reading Hacker News.

Reading Hacker News is important to you?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#309

Post by versteegen »

fn-mote wrote: post #303
Zak wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever independently develop a compiler for a truly novel programming language I did exactly that using an LLM. It may not count as independent depending on how strict you are about that, but then LLMs don't do anything independently . I wrote a small sample program and expected output, then told the LLM to write a compiler for it in C using LLVM. I subsequently told it to extend the lang…

My main argument about this kind of work is that it is (essentially if not exactly) in the training set. I want a different argument before I believe that LLMs are doing “out of training dataspace creativity” (extrapolation not interpolation).

It's true. Creative work is in the training set.

Being serious. "Think about what this might mean..." Finding unexpected links between various ideas and background knowledge. What we call a "novel idea" is virtually always the repurposing of an idea/concept in a new context. A system that maps arbitrary inputs into abstraction spaces in which similarities are discoverable, such as say a deep learning system, is perfect for this.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#310

Post by altmanaltman »

taybin wrote: post #285
altmanaltman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally my turn to shine! I learned how to play guitar for like a decade before I got into programming. I also write a lot and have some small novels I have finished. I feel your analogy is right but it can extend to anything. Plumbing is a job, programing is a job and yes its basically the same process if you see at as a job. But what OP means is the skill/ability of programming rather than the job of it. Think of a…

I actually think plumbing does require a bunch of creativity. Trying to add some fixture to an old house with out of spec walls and prior creative solutions can be a real challenge. And you can really appreciate the people who come up with an elegant solution that isn't "tear it out and redo it from scratch". I'd like to read that blog post.

Yeah that also makes sense. I guess a better comment would have been to highlight the art/work aspects of any process. Like yeah, most jobs (even those that include creativite processes) will just become boring because jobs are standardized usually where you're going from point a to point b doing the same thing again and again. But that doesn't mean there is no art/creativity to the process itself but rather we restrict it intentionally in fixed jobs to standardize and this causes the split between thinking of code as a creative or non-creative pursuit.
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