Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes programming differently difficult

cacm.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 154 posts

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#41

Post by bnfcl »

asdfman123 wrote: post #17
mostlysimilar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

Understanding the fundamentals of anything will always be a valuable skill, and that only comes from hard work and experience. And much of the experience lies in tacit knowledge, not easily added as AI training data.

That, combined with knowing what to build, and more importantly what NOT to build, I don’t think AI ever will take away from us.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#42

Post by knickish »

leke wrote: post #24
dsmurrell wrote: post #6

It's somehow more tiring, reading complex plans in response to your guidance, and then making decision after decision. Reminds me of this Alan Watts bit... A farmer who ordered a farmhand quickly discovered he was an extraordinarily efficient worker. The first day, he put him on sawing logs, and the farmhand sawed more logs than anybody else, ever. It was fantastic — but the wood-cutting work was all done in one day.…

If the AI is asking you questions and requiring you to make decision after decision, then perhaps it's a spec issue. I know I've written a good spec if the AI does not ask any questions and doesn't get anything wrong after implementing the user story.

You're not wrong, but isn't that just moving the same amount of decision making to earlier in the process?

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#43

Post by leke »

ramesh31 wrote: post #13
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.

Today a co-worker told me he thought this would mean programmers would get more money because we have been making so much, so quickly, with much fewer bug reports, it's saving the company lots of money on man hours.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#44

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#45

Post by LinuxAmbulance »

asdfman123 wrote: post #17
mostlysimilar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

> 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.

Some things are very easy to solve via code (see https://xkcd.com/1425/), and others are extremely difficult.

For LLM based AI, it can be trained to write functionally correct code easily - there's tons of pre-existing code and documentation that can let AI learn patterns (LAMP stack, messaging queue, etc) and syntax.

Judgement is much more difficult. For some things "Should I go with a message queue for this problem?", there's a known set of solutions as to what works best in a specific situation, sure, LLMs can answer that easily.

But when it comes to turning human goals into code that does the job correctly and is maintainable and stable?

That's a heck of a lot different. Without human guidance and having tons of context gained by years of experience dealing with the very nuanced and situational judgement calls needed, LLMs are going to fail at doing a decent job.

LLMs (and junior people) don't know what they don't know. I think it will be really difficult to get a LLM to work well at a senior / staff level where it's more about coordination, working with human beings, handling situations based on legacy code, knowing what will and won't be fragile, etc.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#46

Post by ux266478 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #23
nphardon wrote: post #8

How many times can we have the same discussion.

Until the people foolish enough to think that you can replace people with an LLM learn their lesson.

Never let possibility get in the way of a value-signaling business decision, I always say.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#47

Post by pydry »

asdfman123 wrote: post #17
mostlysimilar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

For anything that isnt generic I find the effectiveness drops off very quickly.

It's already 100x better at writing todo apps than the average senior developer but when I get it to try and achieve something unusual using a relatively obscure library it flails.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#48

Post by skydhash »

asdfman123 wrote: post #17
mostlysimilar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

> 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.

Define tasks!

The most important aspects is that they’ve always been good at applying patterns, but have no discernment into why and the specific adjustments that needs to be done for a particular contexts. It’s rare that I can’t find discrepancy at the edges if several patterns have been used.

We already have good tools for patterns. It’s called code reusability. So frameworks, libraries, code generators, paradigms, snippets, and the mighty copy and paste (there’s a reason vim has like 26 registers).

Software development is all about managing complexity, which LLM are notoriously bad at. A little supervision won’t cut it.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#49

Post by austin-cheney »

I am looking at the subtitle:

The future of software development will belong to those who can think clearly at scale, maintain durable mental models amid rapid change, and integrate machine-generated output into human-directed intent.

Wasn't this always the case? Maybe I just take this for granted because I am dumb Army guy and this is the only lens through which we dumb Army people see the world.

Whenever the subject of AI comes up in connection to programming it feels like the conversation always misses the human element. When you look at this only in terms of human behavior I am not seeing anything new with AI.

Maybe, its because I write in JavaScript and maybe its different in other areas of programming. In JavaScript it has always been a race to the bottom. The product is never the goal. The goal is always hiring and regarding code as a commodity that is designed to fail elegantly and frequently. So, when I look at AI writing code for developers I can't help but ask: What's different? Isn't that why Angular and React became popular, because they abstract away writing code?

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#50

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Yes a LLM is mostly an information memory de vice, but as a worker you still have to vet it.

I believe the human constraint made us find ways to layer and modularize systems so it is easier to check. Now the LLM produces a lot of code and abstraction have to be enforced. Something is missing.. (resonates with the latest Pocoo blog)

Post reply on HN