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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

#301

Post by oceanplexian »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #286
chermi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This lands. Llms are bad precisely at following what not to do. They work best off of positive constraints. I have a design principles + tech preferences doc I force llms "lint" their approach against. It's not perfect but it helps. I call it a bias field, pushes them toward hopefully the happy and harmonious (with the rest of the system) paths. Obviously this is only partial and imperfect enforcement, but if it's ap…

> I have a design principles + tech preferences doc I force llms "lint" their approach against. It's not perfect but it helps. I’ve done the same but it’s a moving target as models advance and I find half of my points are ignored until I’m prompting “No wtf why are you still trying to symlink the global Python executable just use the virtual environment that’s already activated”. Anyway, companies are pouring billion…

> Anyway, companies are pouring billions into improving AI tooling user experience so most of what I do manually I just anticipate to be a waste of time.

I get patches into the biggest AI projects all the time to make inference faster on my 3090 and all you have to do is read the contribution docs and open a small PR.

It’s not a cabal of super geniuses. We are literally in the Wright Brothers era of AI.

You can trivially outpace what big companies are doing it’s insane, why do you think so many innovations are coming out of scrappy Chinese labs? They are willing to engage instead of being defeatist about it.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#302

Post by cindyllm »

nonethewiser wrote: post #284
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #209

As a tech educator I 100% agree. LLMs are not going to become a "new compiler" where we don't have to worry about the code any more. There's a reason we trust deterministic systems. I've been worried about this a lot, I even created an agent skill called do-i-understand that's designed for novice devs (and experienced too, because atrophy) where the LLM asks you questions about the PR you're about to submit. I've fou…

Why do you trust the non-deterministic LLM with your skill?

[dead]

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#303

Post by efficax »

And so what? How do you think people are going to be working on software in 10 years. They're going to use coding agents and harnesses that work much better than the current ones (although I don't think we're getting anything but incremental improvement from here on out). They will run on commodity hardware. I first got paid for writing code in 1999, I've worked at publicly traded software companies and failed startups, in every language out there. And if LLMs "atrophy" the expertise I built up over those years, then so what? What is lost, exactly? I stopped programming in C++ about 10 years ago when Rust seemed to get good. I no longer remember a lot of the specialized knowledge I had in C++. My life goes on. I am now becoming an expert at building software with agents. The problem is still the same, you still have to apply engineering principles. You just don't have to write the code.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#304

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

> the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it

The word "engineering" means doing things using a repeatable process to get predictable results. If you can get predictable results (e.g. guaranteeing the absence of data integrity issues, security issues, anything that will cause downtime, etc.) without looking at the code, you're still doing the work of engineering.

Your job as an engineer is to choose high-value problems to work on, solve them in the correct way, and guarantee that the functional and non-functional requirements are met. If you no longer need to read the code to guarantee that it has the right set of ilities, then I'm not sure that's obviously a bad thing, as long as the ilities you're enforcing result in a codebase that is sustainably secure and maintainable over the long term.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#305

Post by antonvs »

larsfaye wrote: post #26
toenail wrote: post #6

And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.

Actually, they have for a large majority of the population. And fun fact: that debate is still going on, and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) enacted a rule prohibiting calculator use in AMC. https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc... Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper.…

> we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades.

Compared to when?

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#306

Post by jason_oster »

As always, the innovators will thrive and become the new experts in the field. Everyone else will die out.

It's impossible to buy the FUD that expertise will somehow vanish because people use AI. People come in a variety of capabilities, challenges, and personal interests. Expertise varies from person to person. Those with personality traits that are more likely to take risks and persist against adversity will be the innovators and experts. We've seen this played out countless times.

You have to ignore everything you know intrinsically but can't articulate about innovation, technology, and evolution to drink this FUD Kool-Aid.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#307

Post by kilroy123 »

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…

Judging by how it feels being a customer and using their products, I can confidently say:

1. Yes, we know, and can tell.

2. No, they haven't figured out anything. Just vibe coding it with their bleeding dege models.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#308

Post by pianopatrick »

kypro wrote: post #210
matsemann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I first brought this up late last year – that there used to exist a kind of selection pressure against both developers and against features which would prevent certain functionality from ever being shipped, specifically: - Functionality which exceed the technical ability or knowledge of the developer which built it; and - Functionality which would require an excessive number of changes that time/cost became a constra…

In my personal project I've found having a hard lines of code limit has been a good limit on complexity. Makes me really ask if I need things.

One theory I have floating around in my head is that if a whole code base was microservices and micro front ends that were all less than 5,000 loc then you could fit the whole thing into a 100k token AI context window when working on it. And being few lines of code would force them to be somewhat simple

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#309

Post by xtracto »

Yes, and it doesn't matter.

Writing code in programming languages is a skill/necessity created by us to instruct computers what we want them to do

Initially in the 60s, this was done by connecting circuits one way or another (think ENIAC). Then we devised "programmable" computers and devised a bunch of codes (computer code instructions) that abstracted away those cables.

The we created Programming Languages to further abstract away the hardware complexity, and to be able to write down our wishes in a way that is more transferable between us humans, but that is still computable by machines.

But with LLMs and neural networks, at some point these abstractions wont be necessary.

The computers will still be making computations, but the way we tell them what we want is going to evolve.

It's fascinating.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#310

Post by _aavaa_ »

skydhash wrote: post #168
massagedpelican wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

> There's no such things with AI tooling. The most similar is when fully vibing software and everyone knows the quality of the result.

This is the same “but the ai can’t even do fingers” argument all over again, and it will age just a well.

The whole vibe coding thing only really started taking hold with the release of opus 4.5. That wasn’t even a year ago. you absolutely can be quality software without looking at the code. The only thing up for debate in my mind is how big that software can get before you need to look under the hood.

But that’s dictated by current model capabilities. And I don’t see any reason to believe that they will suddenly stop improving on this front.

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