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

351–360 of 575 posts

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#351

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

Mythical man month should still apply for AI coding. If you look at the code you're shipping, and you can't quickly edit it by hand, or fix a bug with it, you will be in trouble if the models are down, and your website is down at the same unfortunate time.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#352

Post by izzydata »

fsloth wrote: post #256
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write . That is certainly not true. LLMs can't write code worth a damn still, and you have to babysit them to make sure they aren't doing stupid stuff. A human is still by far the best choice for doing programming, and when trend-chasing companies realize the damage they've done to their businesses they will stop pushi…

"LLMs can't write code worth a damn" I think it depends on the - ahem - context. In my experience they usually can, sometimes they can't. But generally their sense of software architecture remains abysmal, so even if their writing is ok, you need to have architectural authority the very least to guide them.

The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#353

Post by chermi »

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…

Oh I'm certain I'm not doing it optimally or close to best practices. It's just an example I had in my head related to my comment.

Although, given opus 4.8->5.0 experience within claude code, I don't know if I'd agree they necessarily improve things with time. But that's just my experience. I should probably read their release notes, maybe just a tweak to my claude.md would help

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#355

Post by morkalork »

gghkiuv wrote: post #241
ahussain wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it only a matter of time before the AI generated autocomplete will contain the correct solution? What then?

fucking is it? AI labs certainly want you to think so but they're running out of time and money. they've been telling me that the advancements of the last three months have made this a reality for the last five years. it's starting to feel a lot like Elon promising fully automated taxi services by next year... 11 years ago

Come on bro, PhD level intelligence!

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#356

Post by ifwinterco »

znnajdla wrote: post #215

This happened before with “real” engineering. Engineers a hundred years ago used to be proficient with slide rules and mental math and 3D assembly by hand. Products designed in that era often lasted a hundred years, like Singer sewing machines and Lada cars and 500 year old churches. Now things aren’t built like they used to be, and few people can rebuild civilization by hand like they did. But the world moves on fin…

It's different though because for structural engineering finite element models (set up correctly) will give you a deterministic, mathematically correct answer.

In fact FEM is arguably more deterministic than the old school pen and paper methods (yield line analysis etc.) which often rely more on correct judgement of the structural engineer doing the analysis.

So I don't think the analogy quite holds

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#357

Post by oh_no »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #351
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…

Mythical man month should still apply for AI coding. If you look at the code you're shipping, and you can't quickly edit it by hand, or fix a bug with it, you will be in trouble if the models are down, and your website is down at the same unfortunate time.

1. I think LLMs will end up pretty dramatically shrinking MTTR, a lot of that will be tooling to proactively resolve problems as soon as they start, but a lot of it is that agents are very good at finding and fixing problems by correlating data, something humans can do but I think we're going to be slower at 2. "The models are down" doesn't seem like a very realistic problem unless you have a single provider/set of endpoints. I do not recommend this setup but I guess if you have a single point of failure that is a risk.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#359

Post by chrisjj »

eikenberry wrote: post #341
chrisjj wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deterministic LLM is possible. Would you trust it?

There are 2 levels of determinism that matter here IMO. Level 1, given the same input you get the same output. Level 2, you know what to change on the input to get a specific change on the output. LLMs are currently capable of level 1, but not capable of level 2. Trust follows what is actually deterministic.

Trust should, but instead is being gulled by those incapable LLMs. And I don't see that changing, given the typical human's seemingly unlimited vulnerability to this con.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#360

Post by hirvi74 »

hintymad wrote: post #275
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…

> 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 implementin…

> 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?

Because great insight and expertise stems from foundational knowledge.

I am a huge hockey fan. In the NHL, the players do not stop practicing the fundamentals once they make it to the NHL. They practice the fundamentals even more. Many practice the same drills as youth leagues -- stick handling, passing back and forth, shooting, edgework, shooting, rebound control, etc..

The best of the NHL might not hit the hardest, have the most accurate shot, or skate the fastest. What separates them from the rest of the lot is that they are fundamentally better than everyone else.

Post reply on HN