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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?

#271

Post by chmod775 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #261
chmod775 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're anthropomorphizing. LLMs can't lie nor can they tell the truth. These concepts just don't apply to them. They also cannot tell you what they were "thinking" when they wrote a piece of code. If you "ask" them what they were thinking, you just get a plausible response, not the "intention" that may or may not have existed in some abstract form in some layer when the system selected tokens*. That information is go…

I’m not anthropomorphizing. I’ve been in many situation where the AI wrote some code some way and I had to ask why, it told me why and then we moved on to better solutions as needed. Better if it just wrote the code and its reasoning was still in context, but even if it’s not, it can usually reverse engineer what it wrote well enough. Then it’s a conversation about whether there is a better clearer way to do it, the…

You just steamrolled on, pretty much ignoring the comment you are replying to, made unkind assumptions, and put words in my mouth to boot. I don't mind some aggressive argumentation, but this misses the mark so completely that I have really no idea how to have a constructive conversation this way.

> where the AI wrote some code some way and I had to ask why, it told me why

I just explained that it cannot tell you why. It's simply not how they work. You might as well tell me that it cooked you dinner and did your laundry.

> the code improves.

We can agree on this. The iterative process works. The understanding of it is incorrect. If someone's understanding of a hammer superficially is "tool that drives pointy things into wood", they'll inevitably try to hammer a screw at some point - which might even work, badly.

> It sounds like you either have access to bad models or you are just imagining what it’s like to use an LLM in this way

Quoting this is really enough. You may imagine me sighing.

> Also, pretending that the LLM is still just token predicting

Strawman.

Overall your comment is dancing around engaging with what is being said, so I will not waste my time here.

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

#272

Post by hrimfaxi »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #71
wek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This honestly reads to me like "if you spend a lot of time doing tedious monotonous shit you can save a lot of time on the interesting stuff" I have no interest being a "great architect" if architects don't actually build anything

"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe" - Abraham Lincoln

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

#273

Post by hrimfaxi »

ralferoo wrote: post #161
leptons wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a human estimate their "programming career" in kilohours. Is that supposed to look more impressive than years? So, you've been programming only about 7 years? I guess I'm at about "170 kilohours".

As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a far more honest metric about how much time you've spent actually programming. Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one ye…

> Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

So your logic is that the grandparent specified hours because they spent that many hours specifically programming, and not by just multiplying the number of years by the number of hours in a year?

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

#274

Post by DennisP »

DennisP wrote: post #195
zazibar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Even if you're using Claude, canceling the IDEs might be poor strategy. Steve Yegge points out in his book that the indexing and refactoring tools in IDEs are helpful to AIs as well. He mentions JetBrains in particular as working well with AI. Your company's IDE savings could be offset by higher token costs.

Perhaps it would help if I include the quote, so from Vibe Coding pages 165-166:

> [IDEs index] your code base with sophisticated proprietary analysis and then serve that index to any tool that needs it, typically via LSP, the Language Services Protocol. The indexing capabilities of IDEs will remain important in the vibe coding world as (human) IDE usage declines. Those indexes will help AIs find their way around your code, like they do for you.

> ...It will almost always be easier, cheaper, and more accurate for AI to make a refactoring using an IDE or large-scale refactoring tool (when it can) than for AI to attempt that same refactoring itself.

> Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ, now host an MCP server, which makes their capabilities accessible to coding agents.

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

#275

Post by 0xcafefood »

kittikitti wrote: post #14
ripe wrote: post #4

> it could also be that these software jobs won’t pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren’t as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn’t as challenging. This sounds opposite to what the article said earlier: newbies aren’t able to get as much use out of these coding agents as the more experienced programmers do.

This article is ragebaiting people and it's an embarrassing piece from the NYT.

NYT has it out for digital advertisers, who directly compete with them. I do sense some schadenfreude here that the tech nerds who work at these places might be in trouble.

"Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code."

To copywriters at the NYT, LLMs are far better at stringing together natural language prose than large amounts of valid software. Get ready to supervise LLMs all day if you're not already.

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

#276

Post by 0xcafefood »

gnz11 wrote: post #167
dboreham wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you read is in service of someone's business model.

What’s your point? Journalists have jobs?

NYT doesn't like digital advertisers and the programmers who make that possible. They're directly in competition.

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

#277

Post by flux3125 »

> You can’t just tell an agent, Build me the code for a successful start-up. The agents work best when they’re being asked to perform one step at a time

That's also true for humans. If you sit down with an LLM and take the time to understand the problem you're trying to solve, it can perfectly guide you through it step by step. Even a non-technical person could build surprisingly solid software if, instead of immediately asking for new shiny features, they first ask questions, explore trade-offs, and get the model's opinion on design decisions..

LLMs are powerful tools in the hands of people who know they don't know everything. But in the hands of people who think they always know the best way, they can be much less useful (I'd say even dangerous)

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

#278

Post by ralferoo »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #273
ralferoo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a far more honest metric about how much time you've spent actually programming. Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one ye…

> Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years? So your logic is that the grandparent specified hours because they spent that many hours specifically programming, and not by just multiplying…

I don't know exactly how they arrived at their 20k hours figure, all I'm saying is that it didn't seem a controversial way of expressing their experience level, and assumed it was intended to be a comparison to the typical 10k hours needed for mastery of a craft.

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

#279

Post by DennisP »

relativeadv wrote: post #258
IanCal wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses. I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard. Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d ins…

But you don't actually do any of that, do you? Instead, you get tired and lazy and attempt to have the LLM solve those hard problems for you too. You just don't tell others about it.

What an odd bit of moralizing. GP said they enjoy doing the hard parts, in which case they probably do them, because it's fun. If they actually don't enjoy it, there's nothing wrong with them using the LLM, when it's up to the task, and then just checking to make sure the code is good.

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

#280

Post by hacker_homie »

dorfsmay wrote: post #260

For me, the biggest shift is people who don't care about local AI. The idea that you can no longer code without paying a tax to one of the billion $ backed company isn't sitting well.

Yeah look at the price of netfilx, do you think starting at $200 it's going to stay anywhere close to that.
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