i write code because i love it. it's something that makes me genuinely happy, so why would i give that up?
100% agree. I don't understand why there is pushback against this.
Because professional development is not just for fun
Why write code in 2026
201–210 of 321 posts
Re: Why write code in 2026
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loops (conditional JMPS - JE/JNE/JZ/JNZ/JB/JNB.. and a dozen others) and functions (CALL, RET) exist in assembly. Goto is there too (all JMPs). C makes assembly sense.
Oh that's an interesting thought. Goto's are considered harmful, because holy hell as a human trying to understand and reason about code, the spaghettifcation if someone else used gotos all over the place and I have to reconstruct their thought process just doesn't sound like fun. But if we're no longer writing code by hand (which, I gotta be honest, I'm using AI to write a lot of code for me these days), then does t…
I assume there's a clear technical reason why GOTO is harmful, it adds to the complexity of the code, makes it harder to understand and fix and evolve. Wouldn't the same difficulties affect the LLMs ability to understand and fix and evolve the code as well?
Re: Why write code in 2026
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
> My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) Code is executable. Specs are not.
Prompt is executable (interpreted) code with LLM agent harnes now, just the syntax is fuzzy.
"Please print 'hello world'"
Re: Why write code in 2026
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out…
LLMs are perfectly capable of translating between programming languages at this point. The main bottleneck for them is logic, not language.
And the amount of logic needed to understand code, including how to fix it or modify it further depends on how complicated the code-structure is.
I wonder about this: Does LLM write better code in a better language?
Humans often have more difficulty fixing existing code than reqriting it from scratch, and un-structured un-constrained code would be a big reason for that.
But maybe it doesn't apply to an LLM if it always rewrites all code from scratch?
Re: Why write code in 2026
#205“Do you know what the industry term for a project specification that is comprehensive and precise enough to generate a program? Code. It’s called code.” - CommitStrip ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/sp... ) I think if you’re doing it right, the core of your code should be the simplest expression of the underlying business logic. Of course there’s always going to be supporting layers, and m…
My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
What I miss in Claude Code is code completion at prompt line.. ah wait it gets back to IDE and Copilot.
Re: Why write code in 2026
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think we're "done", you have no imagination.
What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.
Mature tech evolves more slowly. Think about cars, there's nothing new about them any more. But wait, what about electic cars? Aren't they a new thing? And driverless cars. And soon flying taxis. Automobiles are an old invention but they are still evolving.
Re: Why write code in 2026
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's there to advance to? Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.
This gives "let's close the patent office"
> This gives "let's close the patent office"
This is a really good idea for completely different reasons. :-)
Re: Why write code in 2026
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.
Mature tech evolves more slowly. Think about cars, there's nothing new about them any more. But wait, what about electic cars? Aren't they a new thing? And driverless cars. And soon flying taxis. Automobiles are an old invention but they are still evolving.
The reason the evolution of cars has slowed down so much is mostly regulatory compliance.
With the current ongoing revolution in home manufacturing (starting with 3D printing; currently there is a lot of work done in home CNC machining), it would be easily possible to get a huge leap towards "print your own car".
The reason why you see nothing of this is basically red tape.
Re: Why write code in 2026
#209The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. It's something that's increasingly hard to justify. The answer is of course that people are not paying for code to be written or generated but for some problem to be solved. Whoever does that with the least amount of drama and cost gets the business. And using AI tools just allows for compressing the timelines a bit in a way that is hard to igno…
>There are a lot of not so great software engineers doing mediocre work.
Yeah, and they are all producing 10x as much mediocre work now.
Re: Why write code in 2026
#210If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years. And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everythin…
You’re assuming that progress will continue at the same rate (it’s plateaud a bit as far as I can tell, I can look for sources tomorrow but am on phone now :)) & I think it’s fairly demonstrated that the industry isn’t profitable for training ever increasingly huge models, which get exponentially more expensive each iteration
I wonder, LLMs have progressed at great speed, because they have learned to duplicate what humans did and recorded in the documents and source-code that became the training materials for the LLMs. But now that humans don't write any more code, there is no new learning materials for the LLMs. There are no new things for them to learn. Therefore I expect they will plateau, the progress is no longer so fast.
And maybe we'll get something like a Mad Cow Disease, when AI "eats its own brains". To avoid that from happening we will need continued human inputs, and review.