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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#231

Post by benj111 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #144
benj111 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…

> like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off. They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.

By what metric? Around me it was all sheep farming or weaving.

It seems to me having the agency to choose your own hours, to be able to collect fire wood for the fire is better than on paper earning more, but being in a slum a family to a room, with all the diseases, perhaps the mill owner having a monopoly on what you could buy, or banning alcohol. Yes you may have more money, but I don't think the quality of life was better.

We could make the same point today. I live in an area why you can buy a house for £150k. So am I better or worse off than a Londoner that earns twice as much but paid £1M for the equivalent house?

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#232

Post by benj111 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #126
benj111 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…

> Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)

Yes, but ultimately. Just like transporters, it was pulled out of Roddenberry's arse. We could have have a long debate about how society would work if transporters were a thing, but that doesn't make transporters possible.

The exact same issue arises with it's society. We can imagine it, that doesn't necessarily make it real. Yes WW3 sounds like a good reason, but it's a story, it's a plausible sounding reason.

So yes I am biased, in that I am aware of the future that star trek presents, and on the face of it, it would solve the problems I see coming. But none of that makes it possible.

See also communism.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#233

Post by elzbardico »

analog31 wrote: post #175
elzbardico wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is probably the most democratized profession ever. The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.

I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering. It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all. But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at college…

Yeah. There's a barrier also for professional surfing, soccer, cinema acting, submarine soldering, cooking.

Lots of people bought thousand dollars worth of cooking books and still make food their dogs turn the noses with disgust at.

Maybe there's some fucking talent requirement to do that stuff, even if just a little bit, to the despair of all Project/Product Manager types that secretly hate and despise software engineers.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#234

Post by xorcist »

tbrownaw wrote: post #123
tkel wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

But the LLMs are quite the opposite: People should not bother with developing software, but ask the big LLM providers to do it for them instead.

In all aspects of the term, software is getting less democratized. But that is in line with a decades long trend, where computers used to ship with BASIC installed and now you need a specialized IDE tool which has a learning curve.

It used to be that you could dabble with HTML but now you need to learn a few javascript frameworks just to modify existing code. You used to start a piece of software by running it, modern server software is a fragile jigsaw that is delivered to production in the cloud. The list goes on. The future we are being promised is that you ask your paid-for development agent to make the necessary changes you require and deliver in to production in the cloud.

Which is fine, in a way, but it shifts power to the professionals. Just as Google, Apple or Microsoft owns your identity and your data, and you pay to use it, they can also decide to deny access for any reason. They are private companies, after all, and it is their data.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#235

Post by xorcist »

ryanmcl wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

[dead]

> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance

Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming?

Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learning on the job is exactly what people have done, always. Is it a good idea? Well, it is always better to have a professional at hand to help and do away with the beginner's problems from the beginning, but it's absolutely doable.

Programming is not a black art, but something anyone with a bit of logical thinking can pick up from a book. Hence the "Learn yourself Java in 48 hours" books the were so popular for a while.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#236

Post by xorcist »

SoftTalker wrote: post #144
benj111 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…

> like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off. They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.

> They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.

Perhaps at the start of the industrial revolution, but not during most of it. Which is says a lot about how pricing shifts and finds equilibrium, not only for raw materials but also for human workers.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#237

Post by ryanmcl »

xorcist wrote: post #235
ryanmcl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming? Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learn…

[dead]

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#238

Post by ryanmcl »

falkensmaize wrote: post #178
simonw wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.

But the friction and learning curve is what helps you understand what you’re doing. The friction is an integral part of the process.

[dead]

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#240

Post by tricorn »

ryanmcl wrote: post #237
xorcist wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming? Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learn…

[dead]

I think your example highlights one of the places where even the current level of AI can be helpful and enabling, rather than a competitor for jobs, which is helping a person learn something new. Not always in all subjects (do NOT learn to fly a plane solely by AI, I say this as a flight instructor), and the person has to be careful to verify accuracy, but still it can be amazingly useful, and endlessly patient.
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