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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?

#201

Post by EagnaIonat »

dominotw wrote: post #196
EagnaIonat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

no one wants your vibecoded full applications though. not sure why you are building them.

I am building them because I am using them to do my work faster.

I'm not selling anything, but I can see the quality of what is created and it is on-par with much of the stuff on the App store.

No one would even notice that it is a co-creation unless I mentioned the time to create it.

Just to be clear. Vibe coding implies that you are not reviewing the code that is created, or even knowing what is being created. That is not what is happening.

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

#202

Post by DennisP »

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'm halfway through Steve Yegge's book Vibe Coding. Yegge was quoted in the article:

> “We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents

That tool has been pretty popular. It was a couple hundred thousand lines of code and he wrote it in a couple months. His book is about using AI to write major new projects and get them reliable and production-ready, with clean, readable code.

It's basically a big dose of solid software engineering practices, along with enough practice to get a feel for when the AI is screwing up. He said it takes about a year to get really good at it.

(Yegge, fwiw, was a lead dev at Amazon and Google, and a well-known blogger since the early 2000s.)

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

#203

Post by jqbd »

fastforwardius wrote: post #132
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…

I seem to remember doing it in SQL (EDIT_DISTANCE) 20ish years ago. While I wouldn't say it worked beautifully, I also didn't need to make a single line of Rust :) also no more than 2 line s of SQL were needed.

And how many years of experience you needed to know what to write, and what if you can replace that time with how long prompting takes?

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

#204

Post by c0_0p_ »

johnisgood wrote: post #174
allenu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fly supersonic commercially is the only thing I can think of

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

#205

Post by AUF2026 »

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.

[dead]

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

#206

Post by christophilus »

tayo42 wrote: post #73
jcranmer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say, I do love how this comment has provoked such varying responses. My own observations about using AI to write code is that it changes my position from that of an author to a reviewer. And I find code review to be a much more exhausting task than writing code in the first place, especially when you have to work out how and why the AI-generated code is structured the way it is.

Your always reviewing code though. Either a team mates pr or maybe your own code in 3 months, or some legacy thing.

Human code is still easier to review. Also, I program 80% of the time and review PRs 20% of the time. With AI, that becomes: I review 80% of the time, and write markdown and wait 20% of the time.

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

#207

Post by mexicocitinluez »

leptons wrote: post #97
andoando wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.

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.

There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement.

If you're argument rests on an insane amount of hyperbole (that immediately comes off as just lying), then maybe it's not a great argument.

> I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.

You're not suggesting that asking CC to build the UI for a route planner takes me an hour to type, are you?

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

#208

Post by mexicocitinluez »

iijaachok wrote: post #159
coldtea wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's like everyone forgot that the first result for anything web-related would be W3schools, and the next 5 would be spam message boards that tries to scrape all the other boards and sends you to a porn site when you click on it.

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

#209

Post by butILoveLife »

suheilaaita wrote: post #199
butILoveLife wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's true. We're also at the point where the models and the orchestration around them are so good that any beginner to those tools who knows how to use a computer can build working apps. Interesting times. I was pointing out that practice helps with the speed and the scope of capabilities. Building a personal prototype is a different ballgame than building a production solution that others will use.

I said this 4 weeks ago...

Buddy its outdated.

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

#210

Post by rzmmm »

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.

Someone compared LLM in 2020s to GUI in 80s and 90s. Graphical interfaces didn't replace text interface, but it just became additional to it.
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