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

nytimes.com

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

#131

Post by coldtea »

habinero wrote: post #109
kansface wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've generated 250KLoC this week It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.

If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.

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

#132

Post by fastforwardius »

xtracto wrote: post #62
htx80nerd wrote: post #18

You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly. Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are real.

The other day I (well, the AI) just wrote a Rust app to merge two (huge, GB of data) tables by discovering columns with data in common based on text distance (levenshtein and Dice) . It worked beautifully An i have NEVER made one line of Rust. I dont understand nay-sayers, to me the state of gen.AI is like the simpsons quote "worst day so far". Look were we are within 5 years of the first real GPT/LLM. The next 5 yea…

I seem to remember doing it in SQL (EDIT_DISTANCE) 20ish years ago. While I wouldn't say it worked beautifully, I also didn't need to make a single line of Rust :) also no more than 2 line s of SQL were needed.

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

#133

Post by coldtea »

leptons wrote: post #97
andoando wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.

All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.

>All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI.

No, it wouldn't. Merely finding the examples and deps would take over an hour.

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

#134

Post by MadxX79 »

bot403 wrote: post #127
MadxX79 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should (add 250kloc)

I've worked with a type of (anti?) developer in my career that seems to only be able to add code. Never change or take it away. It's bizarre. There's some calculation bug, then a few lines down some code which corrects it instead of just fixing the original lines. It's bizzare, and as horrible as you might imagine. And it's been more than one or two people I've seen do this.

Now they have agents.

People need to understand that code is a liability. LLMs hasn't changed that at all. You LLM will get every bit as confused when you have a bug somewhere in the backend and you then work around it with another line of code in the front end. line of code

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

#136

Post by andrekandre »

wek wrote: post #42
htx80nerd wrote: post #18

You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly. Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are real.

This is not my experience either. If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then loop until they pass... you can build a lot of high quality software quickly. The difference between a junior engineer using it and a great architect using it is significant. I think of it as an amplifier.

  > If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then loop until they pass...
it can be exhausting and time consuming front-loading things so deeply though; sometimes i feel like i would have been faster cutting all that out and doing it myself because in the doing you discover a lot of missing context (in the spec) anyways...

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

#138

Post by motbus3 »

coldtea wrote: post #131
habinero wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've generated 250KLoC this week It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.

If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.

Managers jobs are more at risk than senior engineers.

My company, and few others I know reduced the number of managers by 90% or more.

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

#139

Post by ipnon »

allreduce wrote: post #124

I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If you don't have capital or can do something else you will be homeless.

But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?

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

#140

Post by heikkilevanto »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #135

Visual Basic was the end of programming as we knew it...until it wasn't.

And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine instruction set.

It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a huge need for this new kind of programmers.

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