The End of Programming

The article gives the example of Bun's successful Zig to Rust of why this is the end of programming. I think that rewrite is a perfect example of why it's NOT the end of software engineering. A non-programmer could not have prompted AI to do that rewrite, and in fact a non-programmer would not have even conceived of the idea of doing that rewrite in the first place. Somebody is still needed to 1. come up with the idea that a Zig-to-Rust rewrite is necessary to achieve certain technical goals 2. prompt the AI to do the rewrite, clearly describing the before-and-after architecture, the goal of the rewrite, and technically verifying the result.

Neither 1 nor 2 can be done by someone who doesn't even know what Bun, Zig, or Rust is, let alone deeply understand how those work. In fact, even I as a programmer with decades of experience in PHP/Python/JS but without specific experience in Zig and Rust probably couldn't do a proper rewrite for a project the size of Bun.

Such a big disconnect in the coverage of coding models and the output they produce.

If you discard coding purity questions like style, architecture, cleanliness - the stuff they come out with is buggy & error prone.

The problems seems architectural - in that context windows are limited and you need more compute to increase them, married with the fact the models are really over confident. But if you do increase them it causes mode collapse. Yann LeCun has a really good graphic in his slides of a circle (all possible answers) and a red line coming from the centre depicting the one correct path. How do you actually stop the model going into the subsequence of wrong paths? I don't think it's possible.

I've had so many times in my day job someone has told me (Claude told them) there is a bug in my code, I look at it and nope - it just didn't look up the right file. Then you push back on it and it completely crumbles and says sorry.

I wouldn't keep an employee hired who did that over and over again and never learned

I agree with the thesis. Development is moving towards intent and alignment and clear understanding of needs. These have always been important but in a future where code is almost free, customers will be more demanding about having their needs met, fast.

Our SaaS company is making plans to move towards bespoke development, which until now has been far too costly for most customers to accept. It also violates the multi-tenant cost/business model, so we're scrambling to figure out what hosting and ops and support agreements look like in a bespoke future.

The implications here go well beyond development. I'm seeing pretty massive changes happening in finance, consulting, HR, accounting, law, design, architecture, health, and everything else. When the value of intelligence is effectively zero, how are humans supposed to market and sell themselves in the job market? Some white collar people might try to move into physical jobs for job security, but it will only take a fraction of white collar workers to migrate to crater wages there too.

We're not ready for this. Socially, economically, and politically. Look at how we treated middle Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs when they were offshored to China. Hillary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." We'll watch jobs and industries disappear while clinging to our own and praying that it's not us today.

UBI is going to be inevitable soon, but it's also woefully insufficient. Giving a developer who used to earn $100k $20k per year UBI isn't going to placate their white hot rage at the social contract being broken. We're going to need universal high income, and paying for that is going to be such a radical social change that I worry voters won't accept it until things are dire.

If I thought this would happen I would've done something else with my life. There's still some fun to be had, and I'll probably stay in the industry because it pays well and I have history here, but the magic has largely died.

I essentially have the opposite opinion, you're going to lose people who had a lot of passion and be left with people who are content writing prompts for money.

The end of programming and the birth of metaprogramming. The art of writing programs that write programs, which itself is significantly harder than writing programs themselves. In fact I'm glad to see this happening because at most shops the use of metaprogramming is minimal to non-existant. (see Linux/Chromium/Firefox/Android)