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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?

#151

Post by rjh29 »

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.

The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.

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

#152

Post by allreduce »

gf000 wrote: post #141
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 nonsens…

Not all software development will be automated immediatly. But I've noticed that many skills I've built are lessened in worth with every model release.

Having a lot of specifics about a programming environment memorized for example used to be the difference between building something in a few hours and a week, but now is pretty unimportant. Same with being able to do some quick data wrangling on the command line. LLMs are also good at parsing a lot of code or even binary format quickly and explaining how it works. That used to be a skill. Knowing a toolbox of technologies to use is needed less. Et cetera.

They haven't come for the meat of what makes a good engineer yet. For example, the systems-level interfacing with external needs and solving those pragmatically is still hard. But the tide is rising.

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

#153

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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.

Why not, normies love to talk with the computer.

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

#154

Post by kakacik »

motbus3 wrote: post #138
coldtea wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. We moved to 'agile' roughly at same time llms started coming. You know who is mostly missing from the wider IT teams landscape now? Most of PMs and BAs, on purpose. Who is keeping their work - devs or more like devops, surprisingly testers (since our stuff seems ridiculously complex to test well for many use cases and we can't just break our bank by destroying production by fast half-assed deliveries).

And then admins/unix/network/windows/support team, nobody replacing those anytime soon. Those few PMs left are there only for big efforts requiring organizing many teams, and we rarely do those now.

I don't like it, chasing people, babysitting processes and so on, but certainly just more work for me.

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

#155

Post by GoblinSlayer »

zazibar wrote: post #144
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 b…

Isn't Visual Studio a one time purchase?

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

#156

Post by the_real_cher »

zazibar wrote: post #144
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 b…

Thats insane!

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

#157

Post by ralferoo »

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…

FWIW I worked for a company from 2002 to 2006 that still had quite a large COBOL team even then. Some of the team members were also in their 20s and they'd been hired and trained up in COBOL.

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

#158

Post by IanCal »

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.

To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses.

I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard.

Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d install a package if it existed or hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough, that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an LLM.

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

#159

Post by iijaachok »

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.

Yes, because search engines are populated with SEO-optimized LLM-filled articles that say nothing of value anymore. The only reason AI-assisted tools are "better" is because Web search is so much worse.

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

#160

Post by bryanrasmussen »

fweimer wrote: post #122
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.

What's the one successful one? Visicalc?

I would say the one that definitely changed programming was moving from the punch card era. A lot of these others that people are mentioning I don't think really changed programming, they just looked like they were going to.
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