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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?

#221

Post by j-a-a-p »

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…

Agree. Marketing, Finance, Legal, already having huge impact for junior positions.

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

#222

Post by DennisP »

gedy wrote: post #218
DennisP wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable of delivering products, who have ideas that are too ambitious to do on their own.

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

#223

Post by gedy »

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…

Honestly while I know everyone needs a job, just speed run all this crap and let the companies learn from making a big unmaintainable ball of mud. Don't make the bad situation work by putting in your good skills to fix things behind the scenes, after hours, etc.

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

#224

Post by DennisP »

stavros wrote: post #219
DennisP wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that they never could have done otherwise.

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

#225

Post by kusokurae »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #180

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”.

My impression is that people who think that LLMs will completely release reviewing or writing code have never really worked on anything safety critical. I'm not looking forward to the next wave of pacemaker glitches.

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

#226

Post by gedy »

DennisP wrote: post #222
gedy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable of delivering products, who have ideas that are too ambitious to do on their own.

Agreed, that's not really who I was referring too.

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

#227

Post by zeroonetwothree »

xtracto wrote: post #62
htx80nerd wrote: post #18

You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly. Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are real.

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…

The less you know about a domain/language the better AI seems to be :)

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

#228

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

stavros wrote: post #219
DennisP wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.

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

#229

Post by stavros »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #228
stavros wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regression…

You think you were able to prompt your way through creating hello world five years ago? Models improve and they need less and less guidance.

Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve my exact needs.

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

#230

Post by GoblinSlayer »

stavros wrote: post #219
DennisP wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you address user requests? Tailor-make a custom app for every user?
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