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It's not the end of programming

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Re: It's not the end of programming

#41

Post by kodoman »

I feel like the article in question was actually saying some like others are expressing here that writing code by hand is over not the other aspects despite the title.

I also think the metaphor of drawing is not perfect but a quite good in this comment in that drawing is talking about something that is missed on lots of analysis, drawing is a free form kind of sketching and one can quickly draw something and work things out. I think being able to quickly code something by hand is still valuable and though you can get an llm to write a script sometimes you just want to write it yourself so you know the ins and out of your 100 cloc script.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#42

Post by [deleted] »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #28
fnoef wrote: post #18

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a b…

Printing presses are not typewriters. The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwr…

[deleted]

Re: It's not the end of programming

#43

Post by NichoPaolucci »

I think that coding by hand is largely not going to occur anymore. What that does to the learning of new developers + the stagnation of old developers? I do not know.

I believe that what makes a good developer (a great developer, really) is the ability to do something at the smallest level "perfectly" or close to it. Chaining those tiny building blocks together. Understanding the entire flow of data + logically. Making something as fast as it can be. When you put more and more of those tiny blocks together, things get a little more imperfect - but a fantastic developer can keep them all perfect for a long time.

We're jumping way above that level. That small, perfect logic process, that visibility is now completely hidden from us, some of us wouldn't even know how to do it anymore. And juniors of today will never learn to.

And maybe they don't need to. Perhaps we will just build "bigger" software so that the level of imperfection becomes less noticeable. Larger systems, more functionality, more security.

I think the brain atrophy is going to hit us HARD though. It feels too fast to rip away the one thing that taught us all of this. Building something piece by piece was the way most of us learned. Then you can jump into bigger and bigger projects and your brain creates those pathways. Previous generations had months / years to learn new tooling - and now we threw ALL of the tooling away and said "use this instead". I think good developers will always find a way to learn and grow, but man is it going to take some time, we completely shifted the way the entire industry produces the machine in the matter of 12 months.

I still believe that code is the best way to represent a sufficiently complex specification, natural human language feels very ambiguous sometimes, like extra lossy compression (whatever that is worth).

Re: It's not the end of programming

#44

Post by silent_ssh »

spicyusername wrote: post #16
sdevonoes wrote: post #12

If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

One thing I keep discovering about the agentic era of programming is that all of the old lessons and bits of wisdom about programming are still valid. They're just 10 to 100x more important now that you can generate 10,000 lines in an hour. e.g. Break your code up into loosely coupled modules, don't have leaky abstractions, don't have huge God files, have good black box end-to-end testing, do the design work before t…

Agree. Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening (not improving!) with increased usage of LLMs to produce code, it's even more important than before to get the fundamentals solid. I don't mean "fundamentals" as in "easy things in CS", but the mechanisms behind the systems we build (on top of). And, not being fresh out of school and having experience _suffering_ with poorly designed systems / processes is also still an advantage, as that suffering will ultimately let one make more informed design choices.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#47

Post by terminalbraid »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #38
owebmaster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program Which is funny because that was the case 25+ years ago. We (the nephews) would create websites using PHP. It was common for 15, 16 years old teenagers to know more about tech than the adults. That's not the case anymore. So this time it might be different.

Luckily the kids this time have lots of different opportunities than just tech, they have crypto, social media, and etc

I can't tell if this is ironic or not.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#48

Post by skydhash »

sdevonoes wrote: post #12

If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

> Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

I was reading a biography of Tovalds and one of the core things that mark the birth of Linux was the drive to learn. Same when reading “Coders at Work”, the will to learn and make things happen is a common recurrence.

I’ve never seen LLM coding that is not “I can’t bother to learn about this”. It’s always about magicking answers out of thin air, not about motivation to explore some fields.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#49

Post by pydry »

hypfer wrote: post #24

I find it interesting just how different the responses to this new tech are. I wonder if there is an inverse correlation between "usage of local models" and "despair", or if I am just making that up. It would make sense, I suppose, given that local models still come with quite the upfront cost. So a lot of people are experiencing LLMs purely through the user-hostile cloud.

the technology isnt the problem at all. it's just being used as an thin pretext to devalue and treat devs like shit by the followers of a new executive religion.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#50

Post by Borg3 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #10

Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same. This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill. A world filled with mountains of terrible cod…

Yeah right, like I want to take over the shit broccoli haired nephews created... Even for 3x paycheck.. The one who takes it is a looser, being exploited for pennies to fix all the shit. And I bet at the end, you will be fired anyway, because you are not of their kind..

Winners are managers (who hired nephews) and nephews themselfs, they did barely any usefull job and got paid a lot. They should do usefull job instead, like drivers, warehouse jobs, services, farming and other less paid but very importand and usefull jobs.

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