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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

#431

Post by chrismarlow9 »

roblh wrote: post #378
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 mont…

I would agree if companies did not have a vested interest in over complicating things and creating eco systems to sell certifications and offer a consulting arm aka FDE. Using AI to improve your coding is quick, as you say, but learning all the jargons and protocols and RFC specs so some single company can try to control the new "open source" world is what is going to take a while. All the weird little token and model nuances and stuff. I would say at least keep up with knowing the acronyms of you're not going to learn it directly.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#432

Post by piker »

apatheticonion wrote: post #415

I 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…

Agreed. I think VS Code + Codex or similar is great, personally. I never (1) hit any kind of limits with the $20 plan or (2) lose control of the code base whatsoever. I'm also not shipping at 300x or whatever some other folks claim.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#433

Post by calvinmorrison »

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…

> Engineers have done amazing work of abstracting away the hard algorithms and data structures.

Not to mention we told everyone to not roll their own anything, just use the free library for, clocks, time, crypto, auth, IPC, etc!

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#434

Post by calvinmorrison »

adamddev1 wrote: post #316

We are spending sooo much for our intellectual time and energy on discussions about alchemy-like experiments with different models, agents, harnesses, orchestrations. And there are huge amounts of time, energy, and writing sunk into arguing about AI or trying to convince people of the danger or problems. Sadly all of this is taking time away that could be spent on real progress and learning about coding/FP/PL/algorit…

> Sadly all of this is taking time away that could be spent on real progress and learning about coding/FP/PL/algorithms/type theory/etc.

Well we could also put a halt to the production of tesla and go back to producing the perfect vehicle, the Saab 900 Turbo, but you know, I don't get to (yet - I will be King one day) determine what others do

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#435

Post by zqna »

GPerson wrote: post #328
lrvick wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m assuming you’re a software engineer. The AI programming meta that keeps evolving (last month it was loops) seems like a relatively trivial skill to adopt compared to learning what it’s like to do high quality work and to participate in a team, and these kinds of things. If the AI stops improving then everyone will master the AI skill set that everyone else is using, and people will acquire maturity and experience…

There 4 categories of people: the bandits, the smarts, the naives and the stupids. Bandits reign over the world, and in the past they needed the naives and the stupids to make them rich. In the age when enrichment can be automated they can see that naives and stupides are only contributing in shrinking their cake. They only need few smarts to keep their infrastructure alive so they could enjoy the planet for themselves.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#437

Post by Gigachad »

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 hardest part about being a software engineer is just filtering through AI generated artifacts

This is so real. Jira tickets used to include a paragraph about what the change or feature needed is, a screenshot from figma for what it should look like and that's it.

Now I get tickets from the product manager that contain a whole novel waffling on about specific variables in the codebase that need to be changed which I have to wade through to work out what the prompt was that explains the actual product change desired.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#438

Post by dragandj »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #431
roblh wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mont…

I would agree if companies did not have a vested interest in over complicating things and creating eco systems to sell certifications and offer a consulting arm aka FDE. Using AI to improve your coding is quick, as you say, but learning all the jargons and protocols and RFC specs so some single company can try to control the new "open source" world is what is going to take a while. All the weird little token and mode…

Luckily, the jargon in the vibe coding space go away even sooner than it comes :)

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#439

Post by agentultra »

It was already difficult to maintain before these tools went mainstream. I’ve worked with many a senior developer who couldn’t write a hash function, didn’t understand memory allocation, and could go on all day about best practices and lint rules. They could make things that, “work,” but couldn’t tell you why.

And that was fine! It was a pain. But people need to learn. If you had experienced people around who did know those things then everyone would learn and improve. Most of the time.

Also, we were limited in how much code, and therefore how much slop, we could produce.

Now everyone has a firehose aimed at production. It’s hard to keep up.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#440

Post by ryeights »

ben_w wrote: post #335
bhavansig wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason it's called Software Engineering

Coding My claim is just that LLMs are basically fine now with the "coding" part. Not so much with development, definitely not with engineering.

Outside of the most niche domains like frontier AI development, are there software engineering questions that Sol 5.6/Fable 5 can't answer better than the median software engineer if explicitly asked? It strikes me that models already have superhuman software architecture capabilities, they are simply underelicited.

Furthermore the AI companies are spending gobs of money and compute to address this—harness development, orchestration/agent coordination, computer use are all designed to lower the skill level required to get the best results out of a given model.

Soon the models themselves will be more persistent, more observant, and more skilled than any of us at driving models to obtain the "right" solution in a given SWE context.

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