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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

#371

Post by DanHulton »

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…

Exactly this. You still have to understand the abstraction layer the LLM is working at in order to be able to form an opinion about the quality of the code. (If you DON’T care about the quality of the code, there’s always been ways to get an extra 1000% short-term speed improvement by just not giving a shit.)

AI isn’t “a code abstraction layer” any more than Jira is, or the engineer themselves is.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#372

Post by rozap »

01100011 wrote: post #75

TBH it was already pretty bad. There is a stark difference between the best and the average in my experience. The top, say, ten percent of coders are vastly better than anyone else when it comes to anything but boilerplate glue code(which is still needed and is better done by average coders anyway). This is speaking from my experience as a systems/c/c++ guy. If you are a js web frontend guy, python, or whatever I hav…

Yea, it does apply. Honestly I'd argue that as you move up the abstraction layer cake, it applies even more. If a team gets a tool which 2x's their output (maybe a higher level language vs writing in C), then the difference in absolute output someone who produces 1 widget per day and 5 widgets per day becomes substantial. If you're given a tool which 10x's your output in a day, then it's even bigger. And of course you can have devs on a team who produce -.5 widgets per day.

Think about the worst colleague you've had, now give them a tool which 10x's their output :)

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#374

Post by oldsklgdfth »

when the tool becomes a crutch you end up with a limp.

at work, i can tell that people are not thinking and losing the ability to thinking hard.

I keep coming back to what LLMs "really" are. Recursive autocomplete, it keeps choosing the best fit for the next token. This really demystifies it for me. It also reinforces that is not "reasoning", so there's no hidden mental model.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#375

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

chrisjj wrote: post #340
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean in the traditional software sense. We trust autopilots to fly planes. Would you get on a plane flown by an LLM?

Then I think I'd rephrase you: There's a reason we trust trusted systems. :) Even their fans agree, LLMs are inherently unreliable. The fact some people trust them regardless is due to a deep flaw in human psychology that I believe has not been significantly exploited by any previous tech. There will be tears.

I think two things contribute to the trust in LLMs:

1. Decades of generally reliable systems (I trust my calculator because it always says 1+1=2) has trained people to believe what computers say.

2. LLMs "speak" with great confidence, which has, as you say, a psychological effect.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#376

Post by daringrain32781 »

greenowl wrote: post #116
not_the_fda wrote: post #105

Writing code was never the job. It was a small part of the job that can now be delegated to AI. Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage. You know `Engineering`. Mechanical and Electrical engineers didn't go away because of CAD.

> Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage. Besides your first point, the rest can be delegated to AI as well. And you don't need to be a "software engineer" to spec out requirements and user needs.

This is happening at my company: all of these software phases are being delegated to AI. And the people without any understanding of software have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Features no one needs are being made in minutes. It hasn't been long enough to really tell how that's turning out. Everything seems to be in endless development.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#377

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #363
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…

It doesn't matter if the LLM is not deterministic.. the OUTPUT of typed code is deterministic in the sense that it can be seen to be type safe, compiled, and run appropriate unit tests on it. If I use two LLM's to create some chunk of code and they both do it slightly differently but they both compile and pass appropriate tests.. it honestly doesn't matter if the LLM itself is not deterministic in exactly what it's g…

We don't run our own unit tests on compiled code because it generally can be trusted. LLMs are an extraordinarily leaky abstraction.

Saying "as long as it works and tests pass" suggests that we can test for every possible scenario. We can't. And tests can be flawed on top of it. Which is why an LLM is no more a compiler than a human coder (as you say) is.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#378

Post by roblh »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #54

The snake eating it's own tail for llm software development has really been met with a shoulder shrug whenever it gets brought up. At best you might have a small cohort of developers that don't cook their brains with AI and their reward for that appears to be having to review terrible AI code written by people who have cooked their brains. Completely unsustainable.

Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple months), whereas uncooking my brain is way way more expensive and time consuming and difficult. We’ll see how it plays out, but so far I don’t feel left behind at all really.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#379

Post by konaraddi »

Great read that brings some rigor (or at least cites rigor) to what has otherwise been anecdotal.

> then what is the path for one to become an expert so they can effectively use these tools?

The article briefly mentions guard rails and I think on the same note we need the AI agents we use for coding to encourage learning and comprehension in its users. Right now it’s completely voluntary and on the onus of engineers to put in the effort to learn since, as the article states, the friction that led to some degree of required learning is gone.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#380

Post by ElProlactin »

Ancapistani wrote: post #285
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…

> 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 this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. My argument here is that what is worth $200k+ is the ability to distinguish the changes that must get t…

> My argument here is that what is worth $200k+ is the ability to distinguish the changes that must get thorough, critical review from those that need only a couple of specific things verified and those that require no manual review at all.

The problems:

1. The market is/has been saturated with engineers/developers earning well into the six-figures who are basically decent at writing code but not so good at anything else. So sorting out who is really worth these salaries is not going to be easy and the people who decide often lack the knowledge and skills to determine it.

2. You need to successfully make this argument to people who control budgets and more and more of them just aren't going to buy it.

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