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If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

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Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#11

Post by thewhitetulip »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

It really depends on th SDLC of the codebase. I've sat in the park with a pad and pen and wrote down ideas for a small-ish utility that had both a DB and some low level systems interaction. I designed all the interfaces, control flow, and user facing ui. A decade ago I was designing class diagrams with public and private methods, then coding it up. Today I can articulate it with loose words and have it come to life.…

People loke you're the minority. Most people use the brilliant strategy if "prompt and pray"

Because of AI speed is valued over everything else

Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#13

Post by bluefirebrand »

jleyank wrote: post #5

Debugging. Lots of debugging. It will be interesting when the researchers look back in 5-10 years to determine which was easier/better - trying to understand generated code vs generating code one understands. If a functional reasoning layer is added to the current lookup level, “do you want fries with that?” might be in their “doing”. If this doesn’t appear in a timely fashion, de-slopping code will be their lot.

> It will be interesting when the researchers look back in 5-10 years to determine which was easier/better - trying to understand generated code vs generating code one understands

We don't need to wait 5-10 years, we have plenty of experience with this already! Software devs always want to build their own because building it is way easier than grabbing something someone else built and understanding it!

Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#16

Post by win311fwg »

datakan wrote: post #9
sdevonoes wrote: post #6

Compilers also write code (they write machine code based on high level langs)… yet nobody asked the same question about them (or did they?) AI needs to be instructed and then some kind of verification of the output is needed. Programmers do that

Bad analogy. Compilers don't reason, they don't hallucinate. They take the language as given and "compile" it to the equivalent binary based on strict definitions in the language. It's reproducible and consistent. Saying they write code is factually wrong, at best they translate it. AI will do the same thing in multiple ways or veer of course and do it another way based on spoken language with no strict syntax. It wi…

The analogy is fine. AI moves us up to a higher level language, and it is understood that higher level languages come with their own leaky abstractions, but the idea remain the same. It is different, but only to the extent that would be expected from stepping up to the next higher level. It's not something completely different. We don't yet have AGI that will magically produce the software before you even knew you needed it. We still need a programmer to write the programs.

Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#17

Post by vivzkestrel »

- in about 5 yrs of time, this is not going to age well

- massive studies ll come out on how 50% of the software engineers dont know or understand what they "generated" at all and how their critical thinking skills have taken a nosedive

- every major software company out there that is busy firing juniors now is going to run into the opposite problem: finding talented juniors and they ll command a hefty pay

- the whole LLM premise runs on one little assumption that they ll improve indefinitely. you are forgetting the law of diminishing returns

- i ll come back here in 5 yrs, this whole thing wont end well

Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#18

Post by duncanfwalker »

win311fwg wrote: post #16
datakan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad analogy. Compilers don't reason, they don't hallucinate. They take the language as given and "compile" it to the equivalent binary based on strict definitions in the language. It's reproducible and consistent. Saying they write code is factually wrong, at best they translate it. AI will do the same thing in multiple ways or veer of course and do it another way based on spoken language with no strict syntax. It wi…

The analogy is fine. AI moves us up to a higher level language, and it is understood that higher level languages come with their own leaky abstractions, but the idea remain the same. It is different, but only to the extent that would be expected from stepping up to the next higher level. It's not something completely different. We don't yet have AGI that will magically produce the software before you even knew you ne…

It might not be the perfect analogy, but it does show some important parallels and differences. Compilers reason to some extent - for example type inference is definitely some deductive reasoning that I would have to do if the compiler didn't do it for me.

The hallucinations point is a difference and one that we haven't quite learnt to handle yet. Generally, compilers are deterministic (even it it might not feel like it sometimes) and there's a lot of useful properties that come from that.

I have recently put Claude into a CI/CD pipeline and it's made me realise how much I rely on pipelines being deterministic.

Re: If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

#19

Post by win311fwg »

duncanfwalker wrote: post #18
win311fwg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy is fine. AI moves us up to a higher level language, and it is understood that higher level languages come with their own leaky abstractions, but the idea remain the same. It is different, but only to the extent that would be expected from stepping up to the next higher level. It's not something completely different. We don't yet have AGI that will magically produce the software before you even knew you ne…

It might not be the perfect analogy, but it does show some important parallels and differences. Compilers reason to some extent - for example type inference is definitely some deductive reasoning that I would have to do if the compiler didn't do it for me. The hallucinations point is a difference and one that we haven't quite learnt to handle yet. Generally, compilers are deterministic (even it it might not feel like…

> Generally, compilers are deterministic

Not really. Maybe more so than they used to be thanks to deterministic algorithms becoming faster, but most compilers still aren't deterministic by default. There are still advantages to non-determinism in compilers, like not having to worry about thread execution order. To be fair, most compilers these days allow you to optionally enable determinism. Then again, LLMs also allow you to optionally enable determinism.

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