Controversial title just to stir the engagement. Congrats, you're on top of HN!
The title accurately reflects what is in the post. Therefore your assessment of the title is unfair.
The End of Programming
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: The End of Programming
#32I think the best glimpse into the future is the bugginess and engineering laziness of Claude Code itself.
New versions ship daily and I seem to hit brand new issues every day. They disappear after a few more updates, but it's damn annoying to keep up instead of doing work, and the direction of changes is lacking at best. The underlying technology otherwise seems nothing short of a miracle, but the contrast is eye-opening.
In industries where this is acceptable, that's the future. In ones that can't tolerate it, it isn't. I hadn't expected software engineering itself to be one of the former but it's kinda obvious in retrospective.
Re: The End of Programming
#33I think I’m on the right track by building a feature flag service for AI coding agents. It will serve coding agents rather than human users.
Re: The End of Programming
#34From TFA: "What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction." “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 specif…
So you are suggesting we will soon drop the "vibe" from "vibe coding"?
Re: The End of Programming
#35Nope. 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.
if you tell it to do a thing it'll try it's best to make you think that it was done. I rarely get good refactors from AI unless I tell it specifically what to do.
Re: The End of Programming
#36LLMs will accelerate the proliferation and searchability of ideas. Many times I've been using an LLM and it'll suggest ideas I would have never come across naturally that have been beneficial to whatever I happened to be implementing. For learning in general, it's been the most delightful tool I've ever used.
On the other hand, if you're working in an industry where you and your coworkers are developing novel solutions that aren't widely known, chances are you'll still be doing that by hand with some light LLM automation. There are industries with a lot of gatekept secrets where LLMs will be less useful. What I will say on that matter is this: if you weren't surprised frontier labs stole copyrighted work for training data, you'd do well to mind what you push through their systems.
Re: The End of Programming
#37I 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
No, it was to build things that were good enough. I am watching initiative after initiative fail after a rapid PoC phase, the more in depth the LLM dependence the quicker the codebase becomes unmanageable.
Re: The End of Programming
#38The main reason that I'm in the process of switching jobs is to get more money, in case we are fucked as a profession later on. So yeah, even if I don't necessarily believe this is the future, I am certainly making sure that if it is the future I will be more comfortable.
What are you switching to?
Re: The End of Programming
#39Really didn't see programming going the way of blacksmithing in my lifetime, let alone early in my lifetime.
Why not? 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 t…
I agree with you.
My personal take is that the AI era will be a rough brush that will help shed all the accumulated cruft in this profession.
I think highly technical, knowledgable people will remain, and thrive in a few years, and all the rest will move on to the next fad, or whatever pays the most.
The reason a segment of the current market will remain is because LLMs still need steering, we are not at a point where an abstract idea can go from Tweet to product, and we are many many leagues away from that. Of course, this has been noted to oblivion before, so I'm not really providing shocker value at all here.
Re: The End of Programming
#40This is a strong article with a distracting headline. Challenge for commenters: can you discuss the content without getting caught up in the headline? My favorite paragraph: > The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “wel…
Simon - I hope this is not a rude question, but do you work with other engineers?