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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?

#211

Post by mexicocitinluez »

sevenzero wrote: post #164
habinero wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I use these tools a lot, and one thing that has stood out to me is that they LOVE to write code. A lot of it. And they're not super great at extracting the reusable parts. They also love to over-engineer things.

I've taken great pains to get by with as little code as possible, because the more code you have, the harder it is to change (obviously). And while there are absolutely instances in which I'm not super invested in a piece of code's ability to be changed, there are definitely instances in which I am.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by suheilaaita »

shinycode wrote: post #191
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 there’s some magic effect from Claude code’s work. But still, often it’s not exactly the same infra and scaling than production grade. But for a customer I guess that’s perfect, they have a mean to make their own tools instead of relying on platforms to build those tools.

I Agree on the customer empowerment point.

I'd push back slightly on the production grade point. The models aren't the ceiling, the user's mental model of software is, depending on his experience/knowledge.

Someone just starting out will get working prototypes and solid MVPs, which is genuinely impressive. But as they develop real engineering intuition — how Git works, how databases behave under load, how hosting and infra fit together — that's when they start shipping production-grade things with Claude Code.

Based on what I'm seeing, the tool can handle it. The question is whether the person behind it understands what they're asking for. Anthropic, for example, mostly uses claude code to develop claude code.

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

#214

Post by DennisP »

lpnam0201 wrote: post #186
andoando wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im curious though, what do you consider slightly out of the ordinary that it fails to do?

Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it could possibly do. I built a game bot using Win32 API to send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while. How could Claude agents possibly do this ? I did use Claude to refer docs and API, though.

That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily.

Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes.

And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.

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

#215

Post by sevenzero »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #211
sevenzero wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use these tools a lot, and one thing that has stood out to me is that they LOVE to write code. A lot of it. And they're not super great at extracting the reusable parts. They also love to over-engineer things. I've taken great pains to get by with as little code as possible, because the more code you have, the harder it is to change (obviously). And while there are absolutely instances in which I'm not super invest…

Yea, by my less is more logic its sometimes also difficult to do. With that approach people try to become clever and write shorter code thats unmaintainable due to mental gymnastics other people have to go through when reading it. What LLMs are doing is probably going for some kind of overengineered "best practice" solution. I personally only use them for simple Laravel CRUD apps and they are admittedly pretty good at that.

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

#216

Post by moregrist »

whoisstan wrote: post #181

I feel the need to tell the LLM to rewrite the article for a software developer audience, but don't, those kinds of passage are hard to overcome: 'Salva opened up his code editor — essentially a word processor for writing code — to show me what it’s like to work alongside Gemini, Google’s L.L.M. ' And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)

> And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)

It’s probably N.Y.T. style requirements; a lot of style guides (eg: Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc) have a standard form for abbreviations and acronyms. A paper like N.Y.T. does too and probably still employs copy editors who ensure that every article conforms to it.

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

#217

Post by mchaver »

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 wonder how much cost savings there are in the long term when token prices go up, the average developer's ability to code has atrophied, and the company code bases have turned into illegible slop. I will continue to use LLMs cautiously while working hard to maintain my ability to code in my off time.

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

#218

Post by gedy »

DennisP wrote: post #190
swader999 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.

Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of following through a logical product, even if they start using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier.

The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.

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

#219

Post by stavros »

DennisP wrote: post #190
swader999 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.

So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.

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

#220

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

IntrepidPig wrote: post #54

> “The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.” This doesn’t really make sense to me. GenAI ostensibly removes the drudgery from oth…

Maybe they mean more soulful like a fellow that blacksmiths his own tools and metal fasteners prior to constructing something. I’d personally think this person was a badass, but until wwiii, it’s so impractical and seems arbitrary because why stop there - get more soulful and mine your own ore too.
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