81–90 of 124 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is cope. There is no going back to artisan programming. Any issues will also be fixed by ai agents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Won't this mean that a lot of developers in Silicon Valley will find themselves out of a job? If the competition (AI operators) can sit 8000 miles away and be paid peanuts.
AI won't end silicon valley, but could still shrink it significantly.
This is the great orchestrator game. It might be the last game. I dont think it lands precisely in our previous "best practices" though, and I don't think it's trivial to solve for. I also don't think it's going to be a human-centric design. I think we're generally better off rethinking fundamentals and designing from the ground up on this one. I think it's also a lot of fun to start thinking in these new ways.
There will always be programming, just like there will always be oil painters and historians. But this is about to get industrialized into stable emerging factory forms, and there's a lot of ways to design those right now. And after that us artisans will either need to find new unfinished aspects of programming-like design or retire. At least take solace that the rest of the world will basically simultaneously be doing so too.
From 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"?
Culturally, it feels like we've already speedran the pipeline of "vibe coding is using LLMs without reading the code" to "vibe coding is using LLMs for code" to "using LLMs is just a tool for coding". LLMs seems to now be mostly accepted for coding (on HN at least), the discussion has shifted to how useful and in what ways.
This 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…
> Reducing problems to that state and designing that environment remains a skill, and one that I expect we will be paid handsomely for. This seems to be what AI these days seems almost super humanly good at. See coding or math I guess. But it does beg the question, why would a programmer using AI as a tool be worse than a programmer building the harness and environment and asking AI to go hogwild? The latter is defin…
I've seen this called "cognitive debt".
If you don't understand the system you are building - if the AI gets too far ahead of you - then you lose the ability to reason about the system and make confident decisions about what to do next.
Reasoning about the system and making confident decisions is the job.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, maybe step 2 can eventually be replaced by AI. But step 1? Why would the AI even conceive of the idea of doing a rewrite in the first place? And rewriting is just an example. There are tons of architectural decisions that need to be made every day in the building of advanced software. This is no "correct" way to do it that the AI can know in advance, it's a technical decision to be made by an engineer.
Maybe it sees a bunch of segfaults in the Zig codebase and decides a memory safe language is better, just as the human did in Bun's rewrite. I'm not sure why you think it wouldn't have been able to conceive a rewrite.
Do we still write code in Assembly? No, we moved over to a form of programming that allowed more people, to easier program.
Did it mean that the assembly guys lost their jobs? No, their knowledge allowed them to still program better then the rest, in the new paradigm world.
Did the creation of visual programming UIs like Delphi, VB, etc result in the end of programming because the entry level was lowered even more? No ...
But people who have no programming experience are now programming. So?
My dad who has at most basic PC knowledge ended up making a few simple programs 20+ years ago, because he had a need for it. He did it with a combination of easy programming language + visual interface like VB, and googling... That did not make him turn it into a job.
My old boss who had no programming knowledge (bank/sales guy) used Microsoft Access to make a ticket system to monitor the employees. With cost calculation, hour tracking etc.
It did not remove the need for programmers, people with actual experience. We also used those new tools like visual UI, or easier programming language (compared to assembly) to work faster, create bigger programs, ...
AI baaed programming is just the same. I have seen non programmers create impressive programs, just like i have seen non-programmers create impressive programs in Visual Basic.
BUT ...
When issues are found, this is where experience actually matters. Even if we do not program anymore in the old way by writing every word, its that experience of understanding how something works, that makes the difference.
Just like the guys that has gone from 100% asm, to maybe 1% transitioned, so are we all transitioning.
No matter how good a transcompiler is (yes, they existed before AI), you always need to fix issues and that requires domain knowledge.
No matter how many programs your transcompile, it means nothing without actually supporting those programs. Making software is the easy part, keeping it supported, bug fixed, etc matters. People may be crapping out tons of programs with AI, most of them are abandonware because creating is sexy, maintaining is not. Guess what the real job of most programmers is? Yea ... the boring part.
AI is a tool, just like how we moved from low level programming language, to compile helper, debuggers, syntax highlighters, to visual interfaces, ... and all of those tools are their to make our work faster, easier, .. to be more productive and squeezer more out of person.
We harvested grains manually, then the first simply tools came. It did not remove farmers. The arrival of the tractor that made harvesting even easier. It did not remove farmers. We now have combines that run on GPS and can harvest themselves and do the work in a hour, that will have taken 1000 people in a day. And yet, farmers still exist. What happened is that people can do more, vs them doing it manually.
Its not the end of programming, programming simply changed in the way its done. And some people have a hard time accepting changes. Its not the end, it never is, its simply the changeover how its done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't this mean that a lot of developers in Silicon Valley will find themselves out of a job? If the competition (AI operators) can sit 8000 miles away and be paid peanuts.
Probably the other way around. The idea behind outsourcing is that you move the generic labor abroad and keep coordination and control onshore. AI can now do the generic labor for even less, so you'll likely see small onshore teams using AI instead. AI won't end silicon valley, but could still shrink it significantly.
In which case your sentiment is probably correct. And now that I think of it, this is potentially very bad news for the outsourcing companies in countries like India. They also have less money to spend on tokens.
McDonald's code gives you something to show but it's no bridge to stand on..