The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by Rich_Morin » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

"With the advent of the new Automatic Programming systems, we'll soon have no need for programmers." -- written about a predecessor of Fortran.

My own programming career began in 1970, and included an intriguing visit to Stanford's AI center. I've been an avid fan boi of AI ever since. Currently the folks I'm watching are the Thousand Brains Project, an effort to replicate a network of cortical columns and support services.

In any event, I've written code in a variety of languages. My current favorite is Elixir, because it offers fewer booby traps and far more capability than any others I've seen. However, my take on languages is that they let you work at a comfortable level of abstraction.

Still, I'm delighted to have an earnest pair of assistants (ChatGPT and Codex CLI) who are able to discuss ideas and issues in my native language. They can also help me translate my rough notes and speculations into (apparently) working code, using whatever resources are available (eg, languages, libraries). Indeed, one of the hardest things to do is to imagine what they are able to do.

I suspect that there are at least a few nerdy nine year olds who are grabbing onto this. I also suspect that there are folks who will do unfortunate things with this capability. Should be interesting...

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

#242

Post by just6979 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #5

cjfd wrote: post #2

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools. What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers

Anyone could make their own tools before this as well. Just needed to learn something first.

Real democratizing or programming is free access to compilers, SDKs, etc. AI coding does nothing to help that. In fact, it hurts it, because those non-programmers only get access to the AI tools on the terms of the AI companies. Sure they could train their own models, but then we're back to having to learn things.

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

#243

Post by just6979 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

CS programs have high attrition rates because programming or "coding" has been touted as easy money for a couple few decades now. When people find out it's not so easy, they bail. Holding a few layers of abstractions in your head is not something that everyone does easily.

Just as keeping most of the structure of a 4-novel-long story in your head is not something everyone can do, hence why being a successful author is not something that everyone can do. Start telling everyone that being a novelist is easy money, though, and you'll see Comp 101 courses filling up and the attrition rate correspondingly go through the roof.

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

#244

Post by just6979 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

wiseowise wrote: post #191

analog31 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?

Because programmers made the LLMs, and they first applied it to the problems they know, so the examples of "replacing a programmer" are abundant. Then the hype train rolled in and now it's suddenly going to replace everything, just that software engineering is the low-hanging fruit since they already have "proof" that it works in that domain.

Hint: it actually doesn't work at real depth, and why not is fairly well explained in TFA: they hype always overestimates the depth of the field. So these advances do help to make easy thing easy (in the case of LLMs because they have been trained on a billion examples of the easy stuff), but don't really end up helping with the hard things (because they really only make new things that weren't encompassed in their training by getting lucky, and because tedious things are different than hard things).

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

#245

Post by just6979 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

ares623 wrote: post #135

Kinrany wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.

They can continue renting to maintain the tools they make.

They _have to_ continue renting, because they didn't learn anything while "making" those tools.

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

#246

Post by BobBagwill » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

snackbroken wrote: post #166

BobBagwill wrote: post #160

If most programming is ShitWork ® and most programmers are performing ShitWork and LLM's are good at ShitWork, then most programmers are out of a job. If those programmers can pivot to another non-ShitWork or programming-adjacent function, they can remain employed. There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].

Beaucoup.

Sorry, I meant to say ᬩᬸᬓᬸ.