Programmers will be replaced by whatever the superintelligence makes out of their atoms.
Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#12If I got a dollar for every time someone says "Programmers will be replaced by..." I'd be replaced by retirement.
I remember being in college in the early 2000s and asking a professor about that, and he mentioned that they'd been saying it since the 70s (at least) and it hasn't gotten any closer to being a reality.
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#13[deleted]
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#14Well, I don't deny the possibility, but...
Have you looked at the ideas people had?
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#15I get it - programmers are seeing an existential threat to their livelihood and they're trying to figure out what comes next. Some talk about how it will boost their productivity. Others talk about how coding wasn't what they really did, it was understanding business requirements. Some point out that AI is actually really crap and it can't really replace them. This is saying they should leverage it to become entrepreneurs.
These are all good conversations to have. We don't know where all this is going, but things are going to change.
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#16Lots of people have ideas. Good ideas. I've got ideas. Ideas are hard to execute on, and not just the programming side. LLMs aren't going to help as much as the author thinks, you get about 1 level of complexity down and they need a lot more direction.
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#17Isn't anyone going to mention Fred Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" paper? 8-)
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#18The act of programming is changing, but I doubt LLMs are ready to replace clear thinking and the ability to maintain simplicity in the face of the ambiguity and complexity requirements.
Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#19Re: Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas
#20> Error establishing a database connection Oh, the irony.
Maybe they can get an LLM to replace their dynamic blog site with a statically-generated HTML page.
Only if they already know the concept to be able to ask about it. Otherwise, I would expect the LLM to suggest increasing the number of database connections, which punts the problem without actually fixing it. Maybe if it is being really clever, it will suggest they use a HA database and then completely fail to show them how to do it.
A LLM is basically a digital parrot. It has no intuition for what makes solutions good or bad, but it will happily parrot things that seem relevant, even when faced with evidence that they are not. It is enough to pass a number of undergraduate programming exams (especially since graders often give partial credit), but it is not enough to solve real world problems.