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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
421–430 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#422I see a large emphasis placed on headless agentic/vibe coding, what I don't see people talking about is how great guided coding is. I have over a 15 YoE writing software and guided coding sessions - that is, using an editor like Zed or VSCode with an LLM integrated, writing code how you normally would but using a flash model to prompt away the annoying parts and/or plan - is as productive as vibe coding, produces sig…
I've gotten immense benefit from "guided coding". I've learned a lot, and it's saved me a lot of time digging through documentation. I also don't have anyone dictating to me how many tokens I should be burning, and I'm not forced to review my co-worker's 3000 line PR.
I agree with your last statement. Frontier models are nonsense. We should be concentrating on focused models that are cheap to run, and don't require destroying the SBC industry, and making my hobbies financially out of reach.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#423The 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.
This paints the situation black and white. Also doesn't help anyone.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#424I'll keep banging the drum: the foregone conclusion is that 90% of the "engineering" out there is necessary and that by "losing" these skills, Bad Things will happen.
What if there's always been two general buckets (or more)? One bucket are large systems that must perform to spec, and the rest are "good enough" systems to at must simply not blow up enough to be useful (see: almost every enterprise software ever written)
I'm likely wrong. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Humans have produced shit code for a long time, and it's not clear that clueless humans + shit AI code is something the market will reject.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#425Alternate take: How many people have known how to program in assembly for the last 30 years or so? It's been a skill on the decline. Good compilers made that happen.
I don’t buy the “LLMs are the new compilers” claim.
Compilers take an agreed upon specific intention “implement X via Y code in order to achieve Z” and make it executable. LLMs in the hyped methodology just take “Z”, and decide on an X and Y.
They’re doing things a compiler doesn’t: picking an approach/behavior, and picking a way to perform that approach in code. Those are subjective judgment calls, not mechanical processes that could be encoded in a classical program. That saves time, but given their reward system (“what the user requests is always the desirable goal”), they add considerable risks to the process of software development as well. No amount of guardrails and code quality agents can sidestep the fact that the decisions they make are substantially unpredictable and only as good as the prompter knows to ask for.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#426Are engineers still making 100s of thousands a year still just for vibe coding while a nurse and other skilled / highly trained medical professionals working their butt off make half of that? Do we think there is going to be a correction for the vibe coders? Pardon I know such question is controversial but thinking ahead.
I've never met a "vibe coder" who has had a software engineering job.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#427It is still fundamentally insecure.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
They may very well shrink MTTR and increase deploy frequency at the cost of all other metrics
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#429And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.
This would be quite the zinger if this wasn't actually true.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#4301784741652 | AI Coding Will Prevent Expertise | https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-experti... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010401
1784840004 | AI Coding Will Prevent Expertise | https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-experti... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027909
1784909478 | AI Coding will Prevent Expertise The need for friction in skill formation | https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-experti... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49037730