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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
211–220 of 246 posts
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#212One other thing that is often ignored: Most of the business class, executive class, ... even working class, DON'T want to write code. The reasons vary, but in general, just as some people don't want to touch maths (even if they might be good at it if they tried), some people loathe the very idea of being technical, either because they think it is beneath them, or they just don't see themselves that way. And like the…
Most people don’t avoid programming because it’s too hard. They avoid it because they don’t identify as technical. Just like math many people who could be decent at it still recoil from it. It’s not capability, it’s identity and preference. Humans aren’t fundamentally logical thinkers, we’re storytelling creatures who occasionally use logic to justify what we already feel.
> Most people don’t avoid programming because it’s too hard. They avoid it because they don’t identify as technical.
But this is exactly what my comment is saying? Not sure what you added that was not already in my comment, you are agreeing with me.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on a long enough time line.
The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level. If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere
You'd bet that if LLMs were democratizing, they'd be 100's of feet away from it.
That they're charging in suggests it can be just as feudal as every other technology. It has no moral value. It's a tool; a butcher can swing an axe in the kitchen as much as in the battlefield.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#214Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the friction and learning curve is what helps you understand what you’re doing. The friction is an integral part of the process.
The friction is why so many people never make it far up enough the learning curve to build something useful that solves their problems.
You could say the same thing about learning to fly a plane or play the piano. I’ve got no problem with people using llms to write useful utilities and programs for themselves, but it is leading us into a world where people are creating powerful things they don’t understand. That’s going to have consequences. We are already witnessing some of them.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he’s saying is split this up into multiple tasks to create the table, insert the data etc
Isn’t that the hard part? If the tasks are small enough and well defined, where’s the win over just writing the code right there and then?
It’s the hard part which is why these tools are so great, the writing of code was the tedious part
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are already companies that exist to audit the security of codebases programmatically so this will just be part of the flow
Spoiler: they're basically snake oil. Or at least they are grossly insufficient.
For now they are insufficient, I wouldn’t call them snake oil they solve a real problem with real solutions and will only become more accurate
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#218Maybe it's time for creating simpler languages, easier to validate with a mix of LLMs, grammar validation, and test-covered aggregation/integration.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect. Democracy is about governance, not access. A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have. (Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and h…
If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.
Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.
Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too! This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!” The word programmer had a ve…
What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python" Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs takin…
Perhaps there will be a lot more people who can write software as well as I can weld metal.
Welding is peculiar in that becoming a professional welder takes a great deal of time and effort (and probably some talent that I don't have), but becoming a terrible welder can be accomplished by anyone in a couple of weekends, and there is great utility in being a terrible welder. Well worth the investment of a couple hundred dollars and a couple weekends.
With LLMs there is now much more utility in being a terrible programmer too. A couple of weekends yields real return on the effort now.