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

Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 574 posts

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#271

Post by dofm »

ben_w wrote: post #264
dofm wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found it intriguingly difficult in my own tests to make LLMs deliberately fuck up grammar in any way similar to how humans do. I suppose this is actually an architectural limitation.

Out of curiosity, I just tried this: write a comment about how to use ChatGPT to write a game like you're a barely literate reddit user, short answer, maximum incoherency and the result was a pretty good simulation. I tried less insulting prompts first, this did not produce a good simulation. Not perfect, gptzero.me still knew it was AI generated (tayo42 is human by the same measure), but if for some reason someone w…

Redditor is too easy.

Conveying the errors typical in a Raise The Colours group on Facebook, that's the hard stuff.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#272

Post by lanstin »

gustavus wrote: post #99
lanstin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the 1890s and 1930s were famous for their population wide critical thinking, of course. Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools these days.

I mean you may be trying to make a point but the counterpoint is Einstein, Bohrs, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Von Nuemann, Feynman, Bohr and most of the other big names all came out during that time. In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out…

We have gotten better at working as a group. The standard model is a tour de force. It was a collaborative effort over decades but is a lot more complex than anything Einstein did. To some extent we haven’t gotten new physics since then because of reality - we have built higher energy experiments but haven’t got new results.

But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#273

Post by GPerson »

lrvick wrote: post #206
GPerson wrote: post #174

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 difficu…

Depends on what you are programming. I have been using it to build things that have never existed before, that I have wanted for over a decade. Experience gives one more imagination.

Me too. I’m failing to connect the dots from your post to mine though.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#274

Post by skydhash »

orangedog wrote: post #161
skydhash wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the boring parts I've encountered have soon been automated out of my workflow. There's the waiting part of some process, but that's why I have HN for.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#275

Post by hintymad »

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…

> The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write.

Remember we used to spend enormous amount of time in school and in our spare time studying computer science? Algorithms, operating systems, compilers, and etc. All kinds of insights. All kinds of fun. All kinds of hard engineering. Yet, how much time do we really need to spend in our day-to-day work implementing or using the algorithms and etc that we have learned?

Engineers have done amazing work of abstracting away the hard algorithms and data structures. In the meantime, there has been little progress or few new fields in the past 10 years or so in business that ask for implementation of new algorithms. In contrast, getting LLM to work is a new field, so it requires tons of new implementations: KV caches, speculative decoding, all kinds of variants of attention like FlashAttention, all kinds of parallel processing techniques, RL pipelines, post-training pipelines, and etc. It's just that the field is so concentrated that only luck few get to work on them.

So, maybe it's not LLM per se that removes the need of writing code. It is the maturity of the software engineering that has done so. It's just that LLM fills the last gap: making knowledge transfer so much faster and cheaper - if all that's left for most of us is slicing and dicing of what has been already been implemented, then LLM can reliably take over.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#276

Post by polotics »

matsemann wrote: post #98
ben_w wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Before, if I would start working / thinking on a problem and discover it was harder than anticipated, that often was a signal that the feature may not be worth it. Because implementing it doesn't fit the current model of how things work or similar. Then it was back to the drawing table and find a better way of solving the underlying issue. But an LLM just happily chugs along and does it, no one feels the friction, wh…

So exactly true! With ideas people unbridled, the painting-yourself-in-a-corner tendency that was always there has gone exponential, add to it the not-completely-aligned incentives, and the oh-so-clever impressive writer of long prose LLMs just end up churning. The real value add may end up being the lesson in honesty and humility to us all...

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#277

Post by lrvick »

GPerson wrote: post #273
lrvick wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you are programming. I have been using it to build things that have never existed before, that I have wanted for over a decade. Experience gives one more imagination.

Me too. I’m failing to connect the dots from your post to mine though.

> 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.

I do not think anyone could do the job I do with AI without my decades of experience, is my point. For now.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#278

Post by wry_discontent »

hintymad wrote: post #265
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…

Boris: "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops prompting Claude and figuring what to do". Boris: "I haven’t written a line of code by hand in, I think, eight months now… Claude Code, 100% written by Claude Code". Boris: "There’s no manually written code anywhere at the company… All of the SQL is written by models. Everything is just built by the models... Claude instances communicate with each other (e.g., over…

They work on research problems you can define a clear solution criteria for.

The kinds of business software I work on don't have those characteristics. If I needed something like a utils library, I think I could easily have Claude write the whole thing and not read the code.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#279

Post by polotics »

roncesvalles wrote: post #166
ben_w wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

this is software development

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#280

Post by intended »

aledevv wrote: post #70

I strongly agree with the concept that cognitive friction is the engine of learning. First and foremost, it's an issue of "dependency": if you stop training the "muscle" of logic and reasoning, it gradually atrophies, just like unused physical muscles. You become dependent on external tools that replace a capability you once had yourself. A historical example that brought about a similar shift is this: when the produ…

theres even more recent things to learn from > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation

> Bainbridge argues that new, severe problems are caused by automating most of the work, while the human operator is responsible for tasks that can not be automated. Thus, operators will not practice skills as part of their ongoing work. Their work now also includes exhausting monitoring tasks. Thus, rather than needing less training, operators need to be trained more to be ready for the rare but crucial interventions

Post reply on HN