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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

#471

Post by monkaiju »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #465
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…

Where do you work where there isn't pressure to use agents?

Where I work we actively ban LLM use in development. We're hiring too so if you're willing to live in Salt Lake City...

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#472

Post by feelamee »

> "We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for" - Sam Altman of OpenAI

true, but he missed one point - we already leave in such world. And pretty long time.

He mean ofc buying intelligence of AI. But we already buying intelligence of humans.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#473

Post by abraxas »

kilroy123 wrote: post #307
hintymad wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So with #2 they are betting that the future models will be able to reign in the mess that the current generation leaves in its wake. It's a bold bet but not an outrageous one either.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#474

Post by [deleted] »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #404
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The exact same can be said for human code... so what's your point?

[deleted]

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#477

Post by marcus_holmes »

visarga wrote: post #243
kypro wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a limit, after a few 10,000's of LOC ai projects start disintegrating and becoming unmanageable.

Depends on the language, obviously. Some languages are more verbose than others, and relatedly, some languages force simple code structures that are less likely to become unmanageable.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#478

Post by bartleeanderson »

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…

I'm 70 and glad I am retired because I can now do what I want with software and now with AI's help. Yes AI is a pain but its one I embrace to give me the capability to create and reason over domains where I would otherwise have little skill. Certainly glad I don't have to do someone else's bidding so they and make money off of my labor. I never had the courage to go out on my own so that's on me. But I am really enjoying the various types of projects I can start on a whim and continue with over time when they are really monumental. I even made a deterministic analysis tool to help me with that using AI with some gentle AI narration over the results. Now I'm doing blender stuff, where I don't know the commands but I can yell at Claude till he gets it done right :) Bart

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#479

Post by whateveracct »

roncesvalles wrote: post #166
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…

>My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the right problem? Even if it's a valid solution to the right problem, is it the best solution given the time constraints? This is not non-coding work. This is coding.

maybe they meant typing? lol

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#480

Post by apatheticonion »

larsfaye wrote: post #445
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…

This is EXACTLY how I am working with these tools, you summarized everything about why I use this approach perfectly. Zed + OpenCode + Mimo/GLM/Kimi models are incredible. I haven't touched a "frontier model" for months. I really treat them as "delegation layer". They're systems that sit right alongside your stack, and at this point, at every level in it, like a connective tissue that intersects at all points. I can…

I had a job interview at Canva where they had an "AI coding round". They wanted to see how I used AI in my workflow.

Because I was using DeepSeek flash, the interviewer was confused at how fast I was getting edits - he'd only used Claude and was used to it thinking for 40 minutes to update a function.

We were building a frontend application and I was able to do that whole guided prompt/review loop. I finished the task with no defects (high quality code) and way ahead of time.

I could tell the questions he asked were prepped for vibe coding with slow frontier models, like "how do you review the code to ensure it is safe to commit" - "make small/reviewable edits and read the code the LLM emits?".

Despite meeting the criteria of a principal engineer in the other rounds, the feedback on the AI round was that "I didn't delegate enough to the AI and was too hands on" lol.

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