It's not the end of programming

Post by charcircuit » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:26 PM UTC

appseecker wrote: post #25

charcircuit wrote: post #4

>It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the invention of the printing press wasn't "the end of drawing by hand". The printing press let you scale copies of something already drawn. That is nothing like what AI is doing here which is making drawing easier. It's more like people now draw by hand using pens and pencils instead of scraping small rocks against bigger rocks. Technically you can still scrape ro…

Fair, but won't big tech collapse without the actual people force?

Post by meerita » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:37 PM UTC

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…

Post by spicyusername » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

silent_ssh wrote: post #44

spicyusername wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / proc…

    Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening

Post by pydry » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #59

pydry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are. We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts. Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinnin…

> Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. It seems bizarre in a way to see this sentiment on hacker news.

Post by brazukadev » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

meerita wrote: post #63

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…

The printing press killed the work of scribes, people who copied books page by page. It was a form of art and craftsmanship. It didn't disappear completely, but 99% of production moved to the printing press. Programming will follow the same path. Typing code by hand will be relegated to 1%, while 99% will be generated by assistants and agents.