Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?

Post by kuboble » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 6:58 AM UTC

mech422 wrote: post #87

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #84

how many times in the history of computer programming has there been an end to computer programming as we know it, successfully, and how many times predicted? I can think of one successfully, off hand, although you could probably convince me there was more than one. the principle phrase being "as we know it", since that implies a large scale change to how it works but it continues afterwards, altered.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of c…

Post by mech422 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

kuboble wrote: post #101

mech422 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of c…

Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it. When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days. I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.

Post by mirsadm » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

postsantum wrote: post #91

bikelang wrote: post #89

If coding truly becomes effortless to produce - and by that extension a product becomes near free to produce - then I find it quite odd that the executive class thinks their businesses won’t be completely up ended by a raging sea of competition.

The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic

Post by pipes » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #92

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially when you have to work out how and why the AI-generated code is structured the way it is. You could just ask it? Or you don’t trust the AI to answer you honestly?

You're anthropomorphizing. LLMs can't lie nor can they tell the truth. These concepts just don't apply to them. They also cannot tell you what they were "thinking" when they wrote a piece of code. If you "ask" them what they were thinking, you just get a plausible response, not the "intention" that may or may not have existed in some abstract form in some layer when the system selected tokens*. That information is go…

Post by habinero » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

kansface wrote: post #95

comrade1234 wrote: post #48

Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two…

I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.