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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?

#141

Post by gf000 »

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.

Well, there are so many more lower hanging fruits that LLMs can actually replace before they get to developers -- basically every middle manager, and a significant chunk of all white collar jobs.

I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced - probably less will be needed and the exact work will be transformed a bit, but an expert human still has to be in the loop, otherwise all you get is a bunch of nonsense.

Nonetheless, it may very well transform society and we will have to adapt to it.

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

#142

Post by conartist6 »

coldtea wrote: post #133
leptons wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when, we'd just go write a blog post or SO answer so the next person wouldn't suffer as much.

Thank god THOSE days are over and everyone just lets everyone else suffer alone now

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

#143

Post by ajb »

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.

Agents are new, but dumb coding practices are not. Despite what it may seem, the knowledge of how to manage development has increased. One practice I haven't seen for a while is managing by limiting the number of lines changed. (This was a dumb idea because rewriting a function or module is sometimes the only way to keep it comprehensible - I'm not talking about wholesale rewriting, I'm talking about code becoming encrusted with conditions because the devs are worried that changing the structure would change too many lines)

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

#144

Post by zazibar »

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 think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.

Must be nice to still have that choice. At the company I work for they've just announced they're cancelling all subscriptions to JetBrains, Visual Studio, Windsurf, etc. and forcing every engineer to use Claude Code as a cost-saving measure. We've been told we should be writing prompts for Claude instead of working in IDEs now.

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

#145

Post by caseyf »

dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv wrote: post #96

> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.

+1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend all day talking to as if it were a human

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

#146

Post by EagnaIonat »

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.

All run of the mill software is gone or on borrowed time. Why pay a subscription for a product that I can get something Claude to build it for me.

Before I was building tools, now I am building full applications in less time than I did before for tools.

What will be around for a while is where you need an expert in the loop to drive the AI. For example enterprise applications. You simply can't hand that off to an AI at this point.

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

#147

Post by pram »

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.

This sounds like some kind of learned risk aversion, like they don’t want to assume the responsibility of altering whats already there.

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

#148

Post by allreduce »

ipnon wrote: post #139
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?

It commoditizes software construction.

The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill. This is democratization.

Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.

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

#150

Post by dannersy »

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…

Because if you don't know the language or problem space, there are footguns in there that you can't find, you won't know what to look for to find them. Only until you try to actually use this in a production environment will the issues become evident. At that point, you'll have to either know how to read and diagnose the code, or keep prompting till you fix it, which may introduce another footgun that you didn't know that you didn't know.

This is what gets me. The tools can be powerful, but my job has become a thankless effort in pointing out people's ignorance. Time and again, people prompt something in a language or problem space they don't understand, it "works" and then it hits a snag because the AI just muddled over a very important detail, and then we're back to the drawing board because that snag turned out to be an architectural blunder that didn't scale past "it worked in my very controlled, perfect circumstances, test run." It is getting really frustrating seeing this happen on repeat and instead of people realizing they need to get their hands dirty, they just keep prompting more and more slop, making my job more tedious. I am basically at the point where I'm looking for new avenues for work. I say let the industry just run rampant with these tools. I suspect I'll be getting a lot of job offers a few years from now as everything falls apart and their $10k a day prompting fixed one bug to cause multiple regressions elsewhere. I hope you're all keeping your skills sharp for the energy crisis.

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