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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?

#231

Post by __mharrison__ »

I wasn't around when we moved to that stack from assembly. I didn't experience the mourning then.

Most folks I hang out with are infatuated with turning tokens into code. They are generally very senior 15+ years of experience.

Most folks I hang out with experience existential dread for juniors and those coming up in the field who won't necessarily have the battle scars to orchestrate systems that will work in the will world.

Was talking with one fellow yesterday (at an AI meetup) who says he has 6 folks under him, but that he could now run the team with just two of them and the others are basically a time suck.

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

#232

Post by stavros »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #230
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.

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

Cars are here and you're wondering how someone could possibly make a faster horse. You wouldn't address user requests. You aren't a business. The users all make their own apps for themselves.

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

#233

Post by crocodile10203 »

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.

I mean if > 30% of my work is drudgery, I have failed already.

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

#234

Post by qudat »

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…

That’s going to give you all a ton of job security in a year when we realize that prompt first yields terrible results for maintainability.

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

#235

Post by crocodile10203 »

rjh29 wrote: post #151
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.

The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.

"bvilders" right now its mostly people who want to build a substandard app and shill it everywhere.

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

#236

Post by grey-area »

wek wrote: post #42
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.

This is not my experience either. If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then loop until they pass... you can build a lot of high quality software quickly. The difference between a junior engineer using it and a great architect using it is significant. I think of it as an amplifier.

I’m amazed at how many great architects and experts on AI we now have.

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

#238

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

stavros wrote: post #229
steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this path for apps where the time tradeoff is worth it vs “off the shelf” apps.

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

#240

Post by stavros »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #238
stavros wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this p…

The issue is that off the shelf apps were made at a time when it was too expensive to make apps. Everyone uses 2% of Word, Photoshop, etc, it's just a different 2% for each.

You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it to be worth it, not the entire app.

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