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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

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Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#171

Post by _dwt »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #153

While true, I'm not sure it matters. It kinda seems like wishful thinking on our part as software engineers that one day we'll be able to go "Hah, miss me now?" but that just isn't the writing that I see on the wall. Over the past year, I've AI-generated two large pieces of software over 2000 commits without having much depth in either domain, and my ability to deliver value as a veteran software engineer has only sh…

> without having much depth in either domain

I don't mean to pick on you, but to present this in the service of this kind of fatalism... you know the inevitable follow-up question, right?

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#172

Post by doctoboggan »

I often think back to the early GPT days before agents as maybe the last time I will deeply learn a technical subject. I think that was when I actually learned the most as I had to stay completely in the loop. I had recently started a new job and had to work with k8s for the first time. Using GPT to help me implement new services and help me diagnose and fix issues with kubectl taught me so much.

Now with agents I don't have any insights into what its doing with kubectl and would have no reason to learn how it works (other than my own curiosity).

I agree that the human no longer gains expertise, but I am not sure that will matter in the long run.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#173

Post by kodoman »

QuercusMax wrote: post #149
mentos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many programs can dispense with 50% of their complexity by just offering an API for LLMs to execute? By way of example I use Kdenlive 90% less and just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC.

All those crazy complicated CLIs are now super useful for LLMs!

Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#174

Post by GPerson »

I don’t think there’s a big societal problem here, except that the agentic programming developers may be out of a job like the rest of us. If AI continues improving it will just keep taking over whatever skills are involved in the current AI coding meta are. If it stops improving then the meta will stabilize and after 10 years everyone will have longevity in it.

I also see no evidence that AI programming is a difficult skill that cannot be learned by any intelligent person in much shorter amounts of time than previous professional skills required.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#176

Post by mcbuilder »

dan_ggggg wrote: post #157
jgilias wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a product guy on the team who was in a deeply not technical role before AI who is trying to do the “hey Claude, read this Jira ticket, implement” thing. It doesn’t work for the vast majority of tickets he attempts because he doesn’t have the necessary understanding to even start thinking about if the solution that the autocomplete generates is even remotely workable. And that’s with fancy dev loops and whatno…

[flagged]

honestly "product guy" is enough of a slur for most technical folks. What you are saying just sounds nasty.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#177

Post by hombre_fatal »

_dwt wrote: post #171
hombre_fatal wrote: post #153

While true, I'm not sure it matters. It kinda seems like wishful thinking on our part as software engineers that one day we'll be able to go "Hah, miss me now?" but that just isn't the writing that I see on the wall. Over the past year, I've AI-generated two large pieces of software over 2000 commits without having much depth in either domain, and my ability to deliver value as a veteran software engineer has only sh…

> without having much depth in either domain I don't mean to pick on you, but to present this in the service of this kind of fatalism... you know the inevitable follow-up question, right?

Is it: "How do you know the solution is good?"

Because I can still reason and dig into things and ask questions and have the domain explained to me out of curiosity, the same way I could build anything that was originally out of my depth.

But what I've noticed is that the need for any corrective power has gone or is going to nil and I'm mainly doing directional work. And even then, I can constantly have sota models "rank the top options and recommend one", and it's almost always the right way forward.

I used to read every line of every plan that LLMs generated, but over time I've realized I have less and less to correct or, more impressively, the LLM had foresights I never considered. The same thing happens with implementation.

Periodically I can spawn a bunch of agents to evaluate the system adversarially to find improvements, and the findings have been so good that it's evident that soon I can just automate that too.

In other words, the skills I need to excel here are more curiosity and patience than tech expertise -- the things that got me into software engineering in the first place since that was the only way to build things.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#178

Post by deadbabe »

pandemic_region wrote: post #132
deadbabe wrote: post #90

I used to think this was a problem. But now? I don’t think it matters. Why? Because people are going to get so much more ambitious about the stuff they build with AI, that code expertise for the stuff they are building is already scarce anyway. People will choose difficult and less popular languages, and will replace open source packages with stuff built entirely in-house by AI. Going forward, there is no choice exce…

Do we even need to get LLMs to create code in the end then? Can we imagine a future where the thing simply does it all, you deploy the LLM like a docker image and have it process all requests directly. Sounds far fetched today, coming to your cluster in five years.

In theory yes, but you would need LLMs that basically have frontier level capabilities but with zero latency, meaning you enter a prompt and as you type the prompt is regenerating instantly like some kind of autocomplete.

I think that would feel like crack for some people who are addicted to using or building stuff with LLMs.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#179

Post by pimlottc »

chris_money202 wrote: post #92

Most computer science programs don't teach "coding" though. There is pretty heavy emphasis on datastructures, algorithms, and system design. I don't think AI atrophies those skills / knowledge as much as the coding language and I think in many cases actually improves them, especially if you are reading the code that is produced and at least understanding the flow of it. I agree that AI reliance is hurting engineer's…

I don't think that's quite correct; every CS program I've seen involves writing code, quite a lot of it. What they don't teach is /software engineering/: working large codebases, maintaining code, dealing with legacy code, long-term collaboration, working with product managed and designers, etc. That's stuff that you mostly end up having to pickup in the real world outside school.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#180

Post by orangedog »

mcbuilder wrote: post #176
dan_ggggg wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

honestly "product guy" is enough of a slur for most technical folks. What you are saying just sounds nasty.

It's a troll account. Stuff like this isn't productive and should get flagged.
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