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Why write code in 2026

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Re: Why write code in 2026

#301

Post by fuzztester »

t43562 wrote: post #248
fuzztester wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dump out assembly? aargh! haalp! Which rock are you living under these days. Nowadays everything is IR or MLIR ... or AIR ... whoops, i may have skipped a few generations. hard to keep up with the dynamic pace these days. got a job to save. sorry suh. mumble javascript mumble framework of the half-week ... walks off muttering

No need for IRs if LLMs are all powerful. Just tell them to generate x86 and ARM and let them get on with it.

Niiice ...

I'll byte the bullet.

Hang on a bit while I register that in my memory.

>generate x86 and ARM

So that hardly anyone can review the machine language output, I guess.

HN users' minds be like:

87.654321 %: JS? yeah. mainhipsterstream. gotta be a part. heart.

smaller %: Rust? wannabe. donno how, u c.

much smaller %: C? oh no ... numeric underflow.

Congrats on moving over to the light side.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#302

Post by satvikpendem »

ioseph wrote: post #300
satvikpendem wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have been storing food for winter for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and the invention of writing, you think they all died off or something? People whose crops failed instead were more heavily affected in winter than hunter gatherers.

Of course, but the surpluses made possible by agriculture meant occasional starvation became a much rarer event

No, people starved way more with farming than with hunting and gathering. All in all you're under very severe misconceptions as to how farmers and hunter gatherers lived which is not supported by the evidence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3917328/

Re: Why write code in 2026

#303

Post by mewpmewp2 »

superze wrote: post #291
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My code is/was worse than AI's, but at least I get paid, so what do I care about the bad news you have.

You are exactly the person who should be afraid then and you prove his point?!

What should I be afraid about? The code I output with AI is now better than what I did previously so I have equalized with anyone who had better code pre-AI.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#304

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #97

>It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. The job of the software engineer increasingly becomes to make himself unnecessary: to empower the nontechnical business users to do as much as reasonably possible, without his/her intervention. This has, of course, been the dream of computing,…

Update: since I have posted this my computer has made several completely insane errors. I guess we're not quite there yet haha.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#305

Post by andai »

inigyou wrote: post #292
andai wrote: post #97

>It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. The job of the software engineer increasingly becomes to make himself unnecessary: to empower the nontechnical business users to do as much as reasonably possible, without his/her intervention. This has, of course, been the dream of computing,…

This isn't the first or even the tenth attempt at making computer programming accessible to everyone. Remember COBOL? COBOL made the computer speak English. It didn't help. A specification detailed enough to control every aspect of the resulting product is called a program. Compilers are AI. The prevalence of compilers hasn't harmed the programming industry at all, quite the opposite.

Well, it's harmed the assembly programming industry.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#306

Post by LtWorf »

fragmede wrote: post #299
galaxyLogic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As a human with a human level of working memory, the number of things I can keep in my head and map to concepts and functions is unfortunately limited. An AI running on an Nvidia supercomputer has higher limitations on what it can hold in its working memory, so could theoretically handle more than my human brain can.

But it won't because it's a language model no an artificial intelligence.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#307

Post by dsego »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #258
dsego wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like math in school. I wasn't good at math in school because I thought that understanding the concepts was enough. But without actually putting pen to paper and drilling through math problems you quickly get lost. It's a skill issue.

I specifically liked math and physics because these were something I didn't have to memorize or repeat constantly. While other subjects felt forced rote memorization. Same with code though. Writing things down feels like a chore mostly, so I am personally glad AI is here.

I didn't mean rote memorization, which I agree is what other subjects were like, we used to say "campaign learning", because we studied the material just for the exams. But with math problems for me the trouble is that I didn't put in the work, I would see for example equations solved on the blackboard and it made perfect sense at the time, but because I would skip practicing at home, I would forget some of the steps and would get stuck.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#308

Post by lelanthran »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #279
palmotea wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thinking happens at least for me before I write. I know what I want to do before I write, and writing is just one medium to get it out there. If there was a faster way, to get my thoughts there I would use that. A lot of people observe that their thoughts get better when they do the work to write them out. It's not just a straightforward encoding process (as maybe a software engineer would conceive of it).

Yes, it gets better, but not because of writing, it gets better because of building, playing it out and observing the results. The trial and error. It wouldn't matter whether I built via voice to command AI or wrote the code myself. E.g. I iterate and see the architecture or the system work out, or I get other ideas because of something I don't like, etc.

> Yes, it gets better, but not because of writing, it gets better because of building, playing it out and observing the results. The trial and error. It wouldn't matter whether I built via voice to command AI or wrote the code myself.

This is a poor argument. The trial and error is the LLMs trial and error of your intention (ironically driven by you), not your trial and error.

It's like saying "It wouldn't matter if I instructed an LLM to solve my trigonometry problem or if I wrote the the solution myself; either way I'm learning trig".

> E.g. I iterate and see the architecture or the system work out, or I get other ideas because of something I don't like, etc.

What exactly are you needed for in this scenario, other than saying "make me $PRODUCT"? The LLm is going to be a lot better at architecture than you are. Your role is limited to A/B testing the result for human use.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#309

Post by lelanthran »

satvikpendem wrote: post #302
ioseph wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but the surpluses made possible by agriculture meant occasional starvation became a much rarer event

No, people starved way more with farming than with hunting and gathering. All in all you're under very severe misconceptions as to how farmers and hunter gatherers lived which is not supported by the evidence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3917328/

That study controls only for habitat quality, which I feel is not really relevant: hunter-gatherers are, by definition alone, nomadic. They move to where the food is!

IOW, hunter-gatherers follow the best habitat, so controlling for habitat is always going to have the conclusion this paper reached.

I'd be very interested in other studies that support this conclusion; after all, that's how science works - a single study proves nothing if many studies conclude the opposite.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#310

Post by lelanthran »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #259
lelanthran wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here. There's a bit of a selection bias there, because writing itself is used as a measurement of progress. But, ignoring writing as a measurement of progress, we can pretty much see that for about 100k years the only tech were primitive tools. Even after…

If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress. And so many thousands of other tech.

> If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress.

That's a big "If". The observation we have is that civilisations that never invented writing simply died out with no tech-tree advancement; and this happened for 100k years at least.

We've got 100k years of "no writing, no tech". We've got around 5k years of "with writing came tech".

The actual tech to write was there for much of the 100k years (cave art), but without writing, the tech never improved.

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