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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?

#171

Post by butILoveLife »

suheilaaita wrote: post #166

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…

> it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well.

I used to think so. Then a customer made their own replacement for $600/mo software in 2 days. The guy was a marketer by training. I don't exaggerate. I saw it did the exact same things.

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

#172

Post by butILoveLife »

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.

Yep. I own a software shop and yesterday was when I realized that I'm no longer going to be a 1%er doing this.

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

#173

Post by duskdozer »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #35
fixxation92 wrote: post #22

Conversations of the future... "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"

> "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!" Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from morning to night the whole long day."

>What's ~~a computer~~ thinking?

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

#174

Post by johnisgood »

allenu wrote: post #79
fixxation92 wrote: post #22

Conversations of the future... "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"

I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.

Hmm, can you think of anything that we could do decades ago but cannot do it now, today?

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

#175

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

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…

>I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced

Most of us will probably need to shift to security. While you can probably build AI specifically to make things more secure, that implies it could also attack things as well, so it ends up being a cat-and-mouse game that adjusts to what options are available.

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

#176

Post by swader999 »

rjh29 wrote: post #151
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.

Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.

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

#177

Post by somewhereoutth »

I have a suspicion that for a task (or to make an artifact) of a given complexity, there is a minimum level of human engagement required to complete it successfully - and that human engagement cannot be substituted for anything else. However, the actual human engagement for a task is not bounded above - efficiency is often less (much less?) than 100%.

So tools (like AI) can move us closer to the 100% efficiency (or indeed further away if they are bad tools!) but there will always be the residual human engagement required - but perhaps moved to different activities (e.g. reviewing instead of writing).

Probably very effective teams/individuals were already close to 100% efficiency, so AI won't make much difference to them.

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

#178

Post by swader999 »

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…

I didn't renew Jet Brains this month. Been a loyal customer and would have quit jobs from 2008 onwards without it.

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

#179

Post by cyclopeanutopia »

pipes wrote: post #107
chmod775 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or ask another model to tell you what the changes do.

And you could first read the thing to which you are replying. Don't tell me it was too long.

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

#180

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

I see lots of discussions about humans no longer writing code but the elephant in the room is the rapid extinction of human-review of AI-made code. I expect this will lead to a massive hangover. In the meantime we try to mitigate this by ensuring the structure of code remains AI-friendly. I also expect some new types of tools to emerge that will help with this “cognitive debt”.
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