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AI makes programming differently difficult

cacm.acm.org

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Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#11

Post by mostlysimilar »

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

That's where I've landed too. Maybe I'm just delusional and telling myself a comfortable story, but I think my ~15 years of experience building software by hand lets me utilize these robots in a way that people lacking it simply can't.

I still absolutely loathe talking to them and using them. But I feel less scared about losing my career these days. Work wants me to use it, I'm using it at work. In my hobby projects I still code by hand.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#12

Post by guywithahat »

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

I wonder about this. One would think new programmers, like old, will learn through experience to care most about the things that matter, and ignore things that don’t. In 10 years my pre-AI experience may condition me to waste time thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#13

Post by ramesh31 »

nphardon wrote: post #8

How many times can we have the same discussion.

>"How many times can we have the same discussion."

Until the people wishing it to be true are thoroughly sated.

The reality is that this is the end of programming as a large scale well paying white collar profession as we knew it.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#15

Post by twa927 »

> Code becomes only one representation of thought among many overlapping ones.

This is wrong, code is the concrete "truth" being executed, the rest (plans, prompts, agent instructions) are just temporary artifacts used to generate the code. What's left is the code alone.

LLMs don't have any semantics, they can't execute anything with 100% certainty. So far programming languages are the only langugues that can do that.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#17

Post by asdfman123 »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #11
bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

That's where I've landed too. Maybe I'm just delusional and telling myself a comfortable story, but I think my ~15 years of experience building software by hand lets me utilize these robots in a way that people lacking it simply can't. I still absolutely loathe talking to them and using them. But I feel less scared about losing my career these days. Work wants me to use it, I'm using it at work. In my hobby projects…

Yep, that's definitely true... for now.

The thing that concerns me, however, is that just a year ago it was only useful for doing things like reminding me how to read in a file. Now it's at the level of a competent junior, who can almost do the whole task from start to finish but needs a little supervision.

All the AI companies are retaining the messages we're sending to their agents to train the next models. I wouldn't be surprised if the agents will be able to do what I'm doing in a year or two.

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of replies to this thread and while I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I have to ask if a lot of them aren't rooted in denial... it's been a hard adjustment process for me too.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#18

Post by causal »

twa927 wrote: post #15

> Code becomes only one representation of thought among many overlapping ones. This is wrong, code is the concrete "truth" being executed, the rest (plans, prompts, agent instructions) are just temporary artifacts used to generate the code. What's left is the code alone. LLMs don't have any semantics, they can't execute anything with 100% certainty. So far programming languages are the only langugues that can do that…

I think you misunderstand. Code is also representing something. It may be what gets executed, but that does not make it "correct".

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#19

Post by cdkmoose »

guywithahat wrote: post #12
bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

I wonder about this. One would think new programmers, like old, will learn through experience to care most about the things that matter, and ignore things that don’t. In 10 years my pre-AI experience may condition me to waste time thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care

I think the problem will be that there was only so much we could do wrong while we were learning 15+ years ago and our mentors had a reasonable scope to watch around us as we learned. People learning now can get a coding agent to build the entire system for them and it is much harder for the mentor to review that work.

My concern is how much damage could be done by someone learning 15+ years ago vs someone learning now.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#20

Post by jorgeleo »

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

Yup!. Over 30 years experience here. Landed on the same place with the added feeling of "We were always intended to develop the judgement of what makes sense and maintainable, where is the surprise here?"

People want the "Fluent Text Generator" to think for them because its marketing calls it AI. At the end is just a tensor collection, probabilistically backtracked adjusted, text generator. It does produces fluency in the answer, but the fact that it sounds correct, to the point of passing a compiler approval, has nothing to do with been well thought out.

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