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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

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Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#161

Post by orangedog »

skydhash wrote: post #151
warmedcookie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is also the "Nerd Factor" to consider which is this unrelenting passion to type away at a screen all day, whether that is yesterday's code or tomorrow's prompt. Few non-technical people have the attention span to suffer such monotony. (Even most devs don't have that to varying extents)

It's only monotone from someone looking, not from someone doing. If you look at digital painting tutorial, you'll see a lot of timelapse, because it's a very slow process where you spend the majority of time correcting stuff. But if you're the one doing it, each individual brush stroke is the result of a conscious decision.

I'm not sure; I find the job pretty boring.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#162

Post by MattDamonSpace »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #81
fechols wrote: post #67

"Assembly expertise is going to collapse from compiler reliance".

Did this not happen?

It did, it’s just a question of “would it have been worth preventing compiler adoption/usage to attempt to preserve assembly knowledge”

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#164

Post by svachalek »

lanstin wrote: post #80
Terr_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really the same, since your average calculator doesn't take over executive function . The user thought and decided what needs to happen, down to one extremely well-specified task, which is so unambiguous that it can be completed by rote and without context. This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework, generate answers, and maybe even submit them on your behalf. If that had been the (average)…

I think we'll find that the people doing that, like the people spending all their time and energy reading slasher pulp fiction in the 1950s, won't be doing as well as the people learning to enhance the power of their education and their expertise via LLMs and strategic alternating between GenAI and thinking about problems. And eventually, if society ever steadies up a bit, people will learn the useful ways of using t…

Those are some big ifs and assumptions unfortunately, and the use of AI unfortunately has an isolating effect that is only likely to move the needle in the wrong direction.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#165

Post by svachalek »

larsfaye wrote: post #160
Daishiman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody knows how to program in assembly but we're doing fine.

That's because the institutional knowledge was passed along through the act of coding. Skills that I learned in Assembly and FORTRAN are applicable to even modern programming languages...but not to "natural language."

It really wasn't. Ask the average young coder these days how many registers their CPU has, or even the difference between the stack and the heap.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#166

Post by roncesvalles »

ben_w wrote: post #66
ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…

>My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the right problem? Even if it's a valid solution to the right problem, is it the best solution given the time constraints?

This is not non-coding work. This is coding.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#167

Post by yipinwong »

I do understand the sentiment of applying "constraints" over AI usage to certain scopes of our development work.

This has an issue in practice.

As an example, Function Programming (FP) has a high constraint on programming, where some don't even have loops (gotta use recursions all the way), and almost no state mutation (Exlixir I believe have a mutable state? forgot).

FP sounds great with all those constraints. But what about the adoption?

It's hard to switch your mindset, and not as natural, thus long leraning curve, and not as wide adopted Same for these constraints. The author promoting using AIs only to subsets (no coding? wtf) is something the majority won't follow. Yes, the constraints sound great, but at what cost? By the time one learns everything, and everyone moves along with AI building stuff fast and cheap, they will be left behind.

---

I do not like the author trying to make his points authoritative by using Halo effect using quotes from the industry and could have had been taken out of context (That's where AIs mess up the most, they only get chunks of text and lost context of before and after exerpts).

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#168

Post by skydhash »

massagedpelican wrote: post #113
xyzelement wrote: post #64

// The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation. The subtitle of the story tells it all. There are some people who seek out friction. Think about an athlete or a hardcore nerd. The best engineers are ones who were fascinated with computers and learning as kids and persued it at every opportunity. Found their own friction in other words. For those kinds of people, friction-seeking is the constant and wha…

I think this expresses what I've been trying to form in my mind. I've been trying to map the LLM advancements and the current state of software development onto prior technological improvements. History is littered with similar cases where the abstraction layer ends up getting lifted, and people struggle with getting accustomed to working at that higher abstraction level. For the people that fall in love with a singl…

> History is littered with similar cases where the abstraction layer ends up getting lifted, and people struggle with getting accustomed to working at that higher abstraction level.

But there's no abstraction layer that ends up getting lifted. When I use a library like SDL or a standard like POSIX, I don't tend to look at the underlying implementation. Instead I work with the high level concepts that they come up with. There's no such things with AI tooling. The most similar is when fully vibing software and everyone knows the quality of the result.

I've learned something at every abstraction layer in computing from electronics (hardware), theory of computation (software) to high level programming languages with their paradigms. Same with several domains embodied by libraries. LLM tooling is more like shamanic ritual than engineering.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#169

Post by switchbak »

risyachka wrote: post #91
ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

Maybe some day, not in the short term. I've seen output of bad developers using Fable and after that I sleep safe. A bad or below average dev with AI will run your product and company into the ground in a matter of weeks.

It's like a tool that has caused a fan out of both good and bad outcomes.

Good: you can refactor your codebase at will, throw out legacy cruft by the megabyte, improve build/CI time, and simplify ruthlessly. Not to mention kick out new features in simple and consistent ways that align with what a user actually wants.

Or you could add megabytes of vibe coded crap, solutions that add a ton of mass but don't actually solve the problem at hand (seriously!), implement abstractions that are logically inconsistent with the rest of the system, etc.

Both of these are happening right now, and I think the latter is happening at a rate far higher than the former. But our fundamental dynamics are still at play - the ball of mud is still a ball of mud, even if AI lets you make it 100x bigger. The problem just gets more entrenched.

Eventually AI will learn how to simplify code, understand coupling, etc - and hopefully it will just iron out problems as it goes. I think we're a long way away from that. But this is uncharted territory, and I don't think anyone really knows. I certainly don't hear anyone focusing on that as a target of optimization however.

My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue, and perhaps we can re-learn these lessons yet again. It kind of feels like GitHub might be the first example of this.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#170

Post by larsfaye »

efavdb wrote: post #156

look to past examples. when the greeks developed writing, people complained that the youth were losing the ability to memorize much content. and that is true, but with writing they were able to do better still and that old skill -- though useful -- was lost.

Plato wasn't against just "writing" in a general sense, or that he felt it was going to hold humanity back. He was against treatises and felt that someone could "memorize facts" without having to actually think about them on a deep level. Which I think, ironically, is not all that off the mark especially in the age of the internet and now LLMs, right? He also felt that memory could decay if we relied on written facts instead of having dialogues, which again, not all that off the mark, either. He underestimated the compounding capability of technology and our ability to record data and information, but people remember a lot less these days than they used to because we'd largely given up that ability in exchange for the instant information machines.

Of course, he's just one man (or two, if you consider he was conveying Socrates' thoughts, as well) who lived in ancient times and couldn't possibly foresee how technology would evolve...but when I went back and read his concerns, it was ironic to admit that much of what he warned about still applies to this day. People are far less informed despite having access to more information than we've ever had because we've exchanged the ability to remember for the ability to just look things up. And, we also have less meaningful dialog than ever before; people just sit on social media, copying and pasting "facts" to each other, instead of having actual productive discourse.

AI tooling can be a boon to learning, but it requires us to stop using them for code generation as a primary purpose (at least for juniors) and instead advocate for Socratic workflows that still require manual coding practices. When someone decides to code something, it's not just learning syntax; it engages a variety of mental disciplines from critical thinking to planning to creative problem solving to logic and math, even.

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