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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?

#311

Post by leptons »

in_cahoots wrote: post #266
lpnam0201 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it could possibly do. I built a game bot using Win32 API to send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while. How could Claude agents possibly do this ? I did use Claude to refer docs and API, though.

My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.

Great, and you've taught him to never learn to code. That's not as great an achievment as you might think it is.

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

#312

Post by sph »

arcxi wrote: post #262
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.

amidst this whole AI craze it's illuminating to learn how many programmers secretly hated programming all along

It’s clear at this point that the term programmer was used to refer to two very different types of people.

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

#313

Post by dominotw »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #201
dominotw wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one wants your vibecoded full applications though. not sure why you are building them.

I am building them because I am using them to do my work faster. I'm not selling anything, but I can see the quality of what is created and it is on-par with much of the stuff on the App store. No one would even notice that it is a co-creation unless I mentioned the time to create it. Just to be clear. Vibe coding implies that you are not reviewing the code that is created, or even knowing what is being created. That…

> I am building them because I am using them to do my work faster.

interesting. any examples you can share?

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

#314

Post by delecti »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #247
mirsadm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is already the struggle. There is too much stuff already.

All that stuff is shit though.

Is all of it shit, or you just can't find the good stuff? "The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic" is from the business side, and you're experiencing it from the customer side.

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

#315

Post by mech422 »

fweimer wrote: post #123
mech422 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of c…

COBOL certainly had a lasting impact, but only for some application domains. The rest didn't seem to be particularly successful or impactful. Maybe RAD if you consider office application macros and end user report generation in it. (Spreadsheets extended programming to non-programmers and had a long-lasting impact, but I wouldn't call them RAD.)

Thats sorta the point... at one time or another, those were all projected to be 'the end of programming as we know it'...

Hell, COBOL's origins was in IBM wanting to make programming an 'entry level' occupation.

Oddly enough, spreadsheets had a huge impact (and still run a lot of companies behind the scenes :-P ) But I can't remember anyone claiming they would 'end programming' ?

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

#316

Post by bredren »

swader999 wrote: post #178
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…

I didn't renew Jet Brains this month. Been a loyal customer and would have quit jobs from 2008 onwards without it.

Me too.

I used to report bugs, read release notes; I was all in on the full stack debug capability in pycharm of Django.

The first signs of trouble (with AI specifically) predated GitHub copilot to TabNine.

TabNine was the first true demonstration of AI powered code completion in pycharm. There was an interview where a jetbrains rep lampooned AI’s impact on SWE. I was an early TabNine user, and was aghast.

A few months later copilot dropped, time passed and now here we are.

It was neat figuring out how I had messed up my implementations. But I would not trade the power of the CLI AI for any *more* years spent painstakingly building products on my own.

I’m glad I learned when I did.

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

#317

Post by mech422 »

ralferoo wrote: post #157
mech422 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of c…

FWIW I worked for a company from 2002 to 2006 that still had quite a large COBOL team even then. Some of the team members were also in their 20s and they'd been hired and trained up in COBOL.

I started by working on back-end accounting systems - most of those seemed to be COBOL ... or SHUDDER RPG.

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

#318

Post by falkensmaize »

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.

Thinking carefully about the details of implementation MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something “built” fast isn’t and should not be the only consideration.

I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.

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

#319

Post by logicchains »

0xcafefood wrote: post #302
logicchains wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are much better at coding now than at writing prose that doesn't sound like slop.

The code is also recognizable as slop to those who know how. Not the tropey "Not X, but Y" kind that's super easy to spot. But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc. A counterpoint is that (maybe) nobody cares if the code is understandable, clean and maintainable. But NYT is explicitly in the business of selling ads surrounded by cheap copy just good enough to attract eyeballs. I suspect getting LLMs to write t…

>But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc.

If you explicitly make it go over the code file by file to clean up, fix duplication and refactor, it'll look much better, while no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose.

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

#320

Post by leptons »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #207
leptons wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.

> All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement. If you're argument rests on an insane amount of hyperbole (that immediately comes off as just lying), then maybe it's not a great argument. > I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me. You're not suggesting th…

>Wire up authentication system with sso.

Simple npm install, all of it has already been distilled into dozens of similar repos. Just pick one, install it, and follow the simple use case. 5 minutes if we're in a race.

>done Setup websockets

If this takes you more than 5 minutes, then you're a shit developer.

>stream audio from mic

Again, another npm install or two, simple POC could take 5 minutes.

>transcribe with elvenlabs

I don't know what elvenlabs is, nor do I care, but I doubt it's as complex as the OP thinks it is considering the rest of their comment was about simple, solved problems.

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