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"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

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Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#151

Post by neonstatic »

bob1029 wrote: post #9

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with t…

> interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.

Or are forced to figure them out.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#153

Post by sensanaty »

maxrev17 wrote: post #30
bluejay2387 wrote: post #25

I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing mass…

No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.

I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped.

Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#154

Post by lowbloodsugar »

noman-land wrote: post #21

LLMs are the invention of the loom. Code is being industrialized. Yes, there always will be artisanal weavers and a smaller number of them get paid a lot more money to do this by people who can afford it. Everyone else either started operating a loom or did something else. Automated looms are now making mass amounts of textiles but the artisans are no longer doing the physical act of weaving. The artisans come up wit…

Art, Bespoke, Artisinal, Mass produced, Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Material Science.

Mass production is certainly here for the majority of programming jobs. The competition for the jobs that are left will be intense, but most simply won’t make the bar. Someone said elsewhere “It’s no different than ordering a pizza: I don’t do the work.” Yes. Pizza is automated now. But no pizza employees are coming for my job. When the AGI comes for my job, we will either have post-scarcity utopia or more likely we’ll all be dead.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#155

Post by pydry »

sensanaty wrote: post #153
maxrev17 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.

I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped. Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest

It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#156

Post by hintymad »

> If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless?

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Wouldn't this mean that product design is hard?

That said, yeah, coding is hard. I suspect that those who claim that coding is not hard are high-level ICs. For better or for worse, as the size of a company grows and as one's career progresses, engineers will often tranform to professional box drawers, expert meeting goers, seasoned report writers, fierce gatekeepers...Anything but deep coders. Over time, they lose touch of the actual building and think that any code can be handled by people under them.

People like Jeff Dean, who still codes and optimizes things like TPU kernel code, is very rare.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#158

Post by pydry »

pjmlp wrote: post #84
cautiouscat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either. Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.

It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes. Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.

I was mainly doing architectural work as a coder long before LLMs came along.

So was everyone else who wasnt slopping out boilerplate.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#159

Post by dofm »

ben_w wrote: post #118
bob1029 wrote: post #9

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with t…

> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers. Invoice: $1000 One bolt tightened: $1 Knowing which bolt to tighten: $999 > The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until t…

> (Isn't that what sales is? Working with the customer to tease out the real thing they need solving?)

For any product of any complexity you can can essentially never successfully delegate that process to a non-programmer.

Indeed you can not that often even trust that the client employee doing the asking knows what it is they need. Almost certainly someone in the organisation who was not in the meeting is better placed to tell you what is actually required.

This task needs an analyst; that analyst needs to have experience of writing meaningful code.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#160

Post by grey-area »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #120
grey-area wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy breaks down because code is not heavily regulated as cars are. This is worth saying precisely because of this difference - people see huge amounts of bad code generated by LLMs and think it is equivalent to carefully written code because the results look similar at first glance and they don’t bother to read it.

The code in cars is, by definition.

That is probably around 0.0001% of all code deployed.
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