11–20 of 124 posts
Nope. Not yet. The frontier still produces slop and never refactors. Your code base will grow with the square of your features and grind to a halt. God speed to folks that work at this shop.
You can often just tell it to refactor though. That's like a scheduled harness thing, not a game changer.
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...
I don't know if this is the end of programming, but i can clearly observe the gradual end of expertise in my company - people slowly forgetting architecture, principles, and how stuff works in general, in favor of code delivery speed. And without expertise you end up asking stupid things to a token producer machine, however godlike it can be. It's hard not to extrapolate...
I guess in most industries speed was always the primary concern. Things like architecture and principles were there only to prevent things slowing down to a crawl. A way to protect that speed
Really didn't see programming going the way of blacksmithing in my lifetime, let alone early in my lifetime.
It's a highly paid, in demand career path where formal education is optional.
They came for the sysadmins first because they had more power, but they were always coming for you.
Even if "Agentic Coding" doesn't solve programming, there is an aligned incentive not to care, I've heard directly from the executives at large companies that they despise the amount of leverage software programmers have... and now they have an excuse to end it on a unified front.
That is sufficed to say that many people in our profession don't actually care about software development or programming, they just saw a lucrative career path.
My personal and somewhat bitter opinion is that the profession will be more enjoyable for me once all the people who are only in it for money leave. I can live a blue collar salary life working in tech and still enjoy it. Maybe I'll have less scrum masters and shit. Thank god.
I don't know if this is the end of programming, but i can clearly observe the gradual end of expertise in my company - people slowly forgetting architecture, principles, and how stuff works in general, in favor of code delivery speed. And without expertise you end up asking stupid things to a token producer machine, however godlike it can be. It's hard not to extrapolate...
I guess in most industries speed was always the primary concern. Things like architecture and principles were there only to prevent things slowing down to a crawl. A way to protect that speed
Functionality iterations or adaptations are just faster with good architecture and principles.
Really didn't see programming going the way of blacksmithing in my lifetime, let alone early in my lifetime.
OK, I think I'm going to bow out of these discussions. Clearly I'm not as into tech as I though I was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess in most industries speed was always the primary concern. Things like architecture and principles were there only to prevent things slowing down to a crawl. A way to protect that speed
And who will fix the slop? Not Silicon Valley programs being paid $200K or whatever. We stand on the verge of a golden age of outsourcing in software which will make all previous phases of outsourcing look like trial runs.