This guy is wrong and this comment gives as much reason to believe me as he's given to believe him.
Programmers are modern-day computers
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#22[deleted]
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#23Okay, but what will you actually do when your LLM writes code which doesn't actually error but produces incorrect behaviour, and no matter how long you spend refining your prompt or trying different models it can't fix it for you?
Obviously you'll have to debug the code yourself, for which you'll need those programming skills that you claimed weren't relevant any more.
Eventually you'll ask a software engineer, who will probably be paid more than you because "knowing what to build" and "evaluating the end result" are skills more closely related to product management - a difficult and valuable job that just doesn't require the same level of specialisation.
Lots of us have been the engineer here, confused and asking why you took approach X to solve this problem and sheepishly being told "Oh I actually didn't write this code, I don't know how it works".
You are confidently asserting that people can safely skip learning a whole way of thinking, not just some syntax and API specs. Some programmers can be replaced by an LLM, but not most of them.
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#24Except that going from human computers to mechanical computers made us more precise and more accurate at doing calculations, not less.
Modern AI assistants have yet to demonstrate greater level of competence than even an inexperienced human programmer. Anyone telling you otherwise has fallen victim to extrapolation.
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#25While I have been amazed by the progress of LLMs and believe that this ultimately leads to AGI, I still think that LLM aided development is limited to things that are often done and are well documented in the training corpus. Writing code with new libraries or less documented lower level apis still requires you to actually do it. LLMs slowly separate you from your understanding of what your code is doing, and if they don’t meet a minimum threshold of proficiency on a topic, they will slowly and insidiously degrade your codebase until you realize Claude (or whoever else) has built a house of cards.
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#26Premises seems completely flawed to me. It’s like if we would say because we have calculators, knowing basic arithmetic mentally will no longer be a necessary step to go through. All the more when the these calculators are actually not giving you exacts results, but excel at producing a lot of plausible lookalike approximations based on large corpus of computation samples.
So it seems not only very wrong on what is the hard part in programming, but also misguided about where (current) LLM use can shine, including in programming context.
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#27I strongly disagree with this. “Computers” would have not been replaced with the machines that replaced them if those machines routinely produced incorrect results. One could argue that for applications where correctness is not critical my position does not apply, however this is not the analogy that the article is making.
Wait what? Human programmers produce incorrect results all the time, they are called bugs. If anything, we use automated systems when correctness is important - fuzzers, static analyzers, etc. And the "AI" systems are improving by leaps and bounds every month, look at SWE-Bench [1] for example. It's pretty obvious where this is all going. [1] https://www.swebench.com/
Sure, people make mistakes all the time. But would you prefer those mistakes be sprinkled randomly throughout your data crunching, or be systematic errors?
The point that that post is making is that a machine isn't going to make a mistake in adding two numbers. It reduces arithmetic errors to 0 (unless you count overflow which can be detected), and if it didn't it would only be useful in the rare case you don't care about accuracy.
AI in it's current state does not do for logical accuracy what computers did for arithmetic accuracy; You still need to verify every output from an LLM, which I doubt you've done for the many billions of arithmetic operations that happened this second on the computer you're on right now.
edit: fixed typo
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#28Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#29> Tomorrow's job [...] will look a lot more like: [...] 3. evaluating whether the end result works as intended. I have some news for the author about what 80% of a programmer's job consists of already today. There is also the issue #4, that "idea guy" types frequently gloss over: If things do not work as intended, find out why they don't do so and work out a way to fix the root cause. It's not impossible that an AI c…
The current implementations of LLMs are focusing on providing good answers, but the real effort of modern day programming is to ask good questions, of both the system, the data, and the people that supposedly understand the requirements LLMs might become good at this, but nobody seems to be doing much of this commercially just yet
Not even good answers. Plausible answers or answers that sound correct.
That is not the same thing.
Re: Programmers are modern-day computers
#30What a superficial and short-sighted take. > Even he, subconsciously, knows it doesn't pay off to waste cognitive energy on what a machine could do instead. > It's not laziness, but efficiency. It's only efficient in the short-term, not long-term. Now the programmer never understood the problem, and that is a problem in the long-run. As any experienced engineer knows - understanding problems is how anyone gets better…
If you have been doing the job using AI for years and still don’t understand what you are doing, just ask the AI. /s
You don’t understand
And you don’t understand.
And you don’t understand.
And everyone doesn’t understand.
Oh wait. You get a "car". And you get a "car". And everyone gets a "car".