The best programmers will use AI to handle tedious parts and focus on the hard problems.
It's not the end of programming
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Re: It's not the end of programming
#72Related:
The End of Programming
Re: It's not the end of programming
#73If 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…
In my experience little of what you said is important is actually needed:
> Break your code up into loosely coupled modules
> don't have leaky abstractions
Not needed. The AI handles breaking up code and I mostly don't review abstractions.
> don't have huge God files
Less true than ever. The AI can read a 10k line file the same way it can read 20 files with 500 lines.
> have good black box end-to-end testing
The AI does the testing by default, and it is fine. I don't write the docs nor do I do design work.
Now what I said is certainly going to offend some users here, but that's how it is, and I know the quality of the product built with this workflow.
This workflow works well for software you develop alone, it is going to be trickier to adopt it in a team.
Still, in my opinion the writing is on the wall for our profession. No one can say with any certainty to what degree our expertise is still needed in the software development process in a year or two.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is this a bot comment? You’re just repeating the comment you replied to.
No, it's not a bot. I just tried to answer the same deal in different comments.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> yping code by hand will be relegated to 1%, while 99% will be generated by assistants and agents. The 1% will be 100x bigger than the 100% of 10 years ago.
As well, but the 99% will be how much bigger? Well, last week GitHub incident shown the commits and PR grown by 14 times.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#76I have resigned to the fact that there be dragons.
I can tell you how things are with Sol.
With Sol you need to know what you're doing and roughly how you'd implement it by hand yourself in order to use Sol effectively. With Sol you need to look over it's work and generally treat it like a junior (reviewing critical sections yourself, reviewing throwaway code and prototypes only cursorily). With Sol it's usually not profitable to write code yourself. With Sol it's basically never profitable to debug code yourself. With Sol you cannot trust it to auto-deploy stuff without an entire pipeline and guardrails.
I have no idea how you will have to work with what comes next.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#77If 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.
> it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm In theory no, but for a successful execution you must have people that understand what's going on, otherwise the competitor that understands will eat you. > who cares how was it written. In the pre AI era a lot of sw was written by interns, juniors, some bigcon consultants, some offshore indian or east-european dudes, it didn't even matter before.
> who cares how was it written.
Everyone who wants it to work properly.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
as an economic activity. i made my own crappy todo apps for fun too but I never once got paid for it. now that I can get a machine to do that instead has the world fundamentally changed?
it is still wrong. Lots of people created and still create software that just themselves use as competitive advantage in their area of work.
Also hard to overstate the sheer impact of a tool like Excel, which in many ways is an ad-hoc programming tool so intuitive that anyone can learn to use it. Even though it sees more jeer than celebration, and is often something techies seek to liberate users from, it's likely one of the most economically impactful inventions of the 20th century, already delivering many of the things we hype AI for.
Entire businesses run off Excel spreadsheets.
Re: It's not the end of programming
#79The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt. Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone. I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine…
> Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent.
So, you'll rely on the tech that created buggy code to somehow suddenly create bug-free code?
Re: It's not the end of programming
#80We a have a decade of Government software to clean up, so we are good for a while
And the bot will dump on us another decade's worth - just 10x quicker.