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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?

#31

Post by sp00chy »

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.

Exactly that is also my experience also with Claude Code. It can create a lot of stuff impressively but with LOTS of more code than necessary. It’s not really effective in the end. I have more than 35 years of coding experience and always dig into the newest stuff. Quality wise it’s still not more than junior dev stuff even with latest models, sorry. And I know how to talk to these machines.

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

#32

Post by lumost »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #25
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.

that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much faster that it is hard to justify ever doing large classes of things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic sensibilities, it simply is what it is).

Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or will not conform to.

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

#33

Post by zjp »

htx80nerd wrote: post #20
zjp wrote: post #9

There is no such thing as "after coders": https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems This excerpt: >A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large, established codebases, and it’…

I spent ~6hrs with Claude trying to fix a web worker bug in a small JS code base Claude made. In the end it failed and I ran out of credits. Claude kept wanting to rip out huge blocks of code and replace entire functions. We never got any closer to a solution. The Claude hype is unreal. My 'on the ground' experience has been vastly different.

That isn't my experience. My code and bug tracker are public, so I have the privilege of being able to paste URLs to tickets into Claude Code with the prompt "what the fuck?" and it usually comes up with something workable on its own.

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

#34

Post by mkehrt »

kittikitti wrote: post #16
ramesh31 wrote: post #5

Because we love tech? I'm absolutely terrified about the future of employment in this field, but I wouldn't give up this insane leap of science fiction technology for anything.

"One such test for Python code, called a pytest" The brain rot from the author couldn't even think of "unit test".

Why would you expect a reporter to magically know what a "unit test" is? Sounds like a simple miscommunication with one of his sources. Not perfect but not "brain rot".

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

#35

Post by aleph_minus_one »

fixxation92 wrote: post #22

Conversations of the future... "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"

> "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"

Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from morning to night the whole long day."

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

#36

Post by pjmlp »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #27
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never worked on offshoring projects? That is exactly what the sweatshop coders do.

I think that the current AI tooling is a much bigger threat to offshore sweatshops than to domestic programmers. Why deal with language barriers, time shifts, etc. when a small team of good developers can be so much more productive, allegedly?

It certainly is,

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro...

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

#39

Post by esafak »

lelanthran wrote: post #19

This is a very one-sided article, unashamedly so. Where's the references to the decline in quality and embarrassing outages for Amazon, Microsoft, etc?

Do we know that it decreased the quality, or introduced more opportunities for bugs by simply increasing the velocity? If every commit has a fixed probability of having a bug, you'll run into more bugs in a week by going faster.

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

#40

Post by thrawa8387336 »

lagrange77 wrote: post #23

It's really time that mainstream media picks up on 'agentic coding' and the implications of writing software becoming a commodity. I'm an engineer (not only software) by heart, but after seeing what Opus 4.6 based agents are capable of and especially the rate of improvement, i think the direction is clear.

I like 4.6 and agents based on it but can only qualify it as moderately useful.
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