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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?

#161

Post by ralferoo »

leptons wrote: post #102
keeganpoppen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much faster that it is hard to justify ever doing large classes of things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic sensibilities, it simply is what it is).

I've never seen a human estimate their "programming career" in kilohours. Is that supposed to look more impressive than years? So, you've been programming only about 7 years? I guess I'm at about "170 kilohours".

As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a far more honest metric about how much time you've spent actually programming.

Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

I personally would only measure my experience in years, because it's approaching 3 decades full-time in industry (plus an additional decade of cutting my teeth during school and university), but I can certainly see that earlier on in a career it's a useful metric in comparison to the 10,000 hours.

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

#162

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

OK, those are all ones that didn't change programming as we know it, but some came closer than others right?

I definitely considered some of those in my list of failed revolutions.

My one completely successful revolution is moving from punch card programming.

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

#163

Post by samiv »

allreduce wrote: post #152
gf000 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. LLM…

The capitalists and industrialists have waited for centuries to get rid of paid labor. Imagine the profits once the cost of human work gets out of the loop!

Of course the question that is left unanswered is how the economy will work there's no one left with purchasing power. But I guess the answer to this is, the same way it works now in any developing country without much of a middle class.

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

#164

Post by sevenzero »

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.

Less is more, its not a hard thing to understand. These companies are accumulating record level tech debt.

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

#165

Post by GoblinSlayer »

MadxX79 wrote: post #134
bot403 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They can always generate a new backend prototype from scratch.

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

#166

Post by suheilaaita »

I'm from an accounting/finance background and spent about 10 years in Big4. I was always into tech, but never software development because writing code (as I thought) takes years to master, and I had already chosen accounting.

Fast forward to 2024 when I saw Cursor (the IDE coding agent tool). I immediately felt like this was going to be the way for someone like me.

Back then, it was brutal. I'd fight with the models for 15 prompts just to get a website working without errors on localhost, let alone QA it. None of the plan modes or orchestration features existed. I had to hack around context engineering, memories, all that stuff. Things broke constantly. 10 failures for 1 success. But it was fun. To top it all off, most of the terminology sounded like science fiction, but it got better in time. I basically used AI itself to hack my way into understanding how things worked.

Fast forward again (only ~2 years later). The AI not only builds the app, it builds the website, the marketing, full documentation, GIFs, videos, content, screen recordings. It even hosts it online (literally controls the browser and configures everything). Letting the agent control the browser and the tooling around that is really, genuinely, just mad science fiction type magic stuff. It's unbelievable how often these models get something mostly right.

The reality though is that it still takes time. Time to understand what works well and what works better. Which agent is good for building apps, which one is good for frontend design, which one is good for research. Which tools are free, paid, credit-based, API-based. It all matters if you want to control costs and just get better outputs.

Do you use Gemini for a website skeleton? Claude for code? Grok for research? Gemini Deep Search? ChatGPT Search? Both? When do you use plan mode vs just prompting? Is GPT-5.x better here or Claude Opus? Or maybe Gemini actually is.

My point is: while anyone can start prompting an agent, it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. And even then everything you learn is probably outdated today because the space changes constantly.

I'm sure there are people using AI 100× better than I am. But it's still insane that someone with no coding background can build production-grade things that actually work.

The one-person company feels inevitable.

I'm curious how software engineers think about this today. Are you still writing most of your code manually?

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

#167

Post by gnz11 »

dboreham wrote: post #37
lelanthran wrote: post #19

This is a very one-sided article, unashamedly so. Where's the references to the decline in quality and embarrassing outages for Amazon, Microsoft, etc?

Everything you read is in service of someone's business model.

What’s your point? Journalists have jobs?

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

#168

Post by psyklic »

dannersy wrote: post #150
xtracto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Before LLMs, I've watched in horror as colleagues immediately copy-paste-ran Stack Overflow solutions in terminal, without even reading them.

LLM agents are basically the same, except now everyone is doing it. They copy-paste-run lots of code without meaningfully reviewing it.

My fear is that some colleagues are getting more skilled at prompting but less skilled at coding and writing. And the prompting skills may not generalize much outside of certain LLMs.

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

#169

Post by holoduke »

The best developers are the ones using AI to its best. Mediocre devs will become a useless skill as even a PO could become one. But one who understands architecture, software, code and AI will be expensive to hire. I know plenty of them. I wory for the ones not willing to adopt ai.

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

#170

Post by swingboy »

fauchletenerum wrote: post #66
npinsker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human minds are built to find patterns, and you should be careful not to assume the rate of improvement will continue forever based on nothing but a pattern.

The overall trend in AI performance will still be up and to the right like everything else in computing over the past 50 years, improvement doesn't have to be linear

Assuming newer, more efficient architectures are discovered.
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