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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?

#321

Post by falkensmaize »

gedy wrote: post #223
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…

Honestly while I know everyone needs a job, just speed run all this crap and let the companies learn from making a big unmaintainable ball of mud. Don't make the bad situation work by putting in your good skills to fix things behind the scenes, after hours, etc.

Management has made it very clear that we’re still responsible for the code we push even if the llm wrote it. So there will be no blaming Claude when things fall apart.

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

#322

Post by RobRivera »

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.

Yea! Back to my amazing Pax Americana of friendly neighbors, high trust in my authorities, and cheerful joyous days in oeace and harmony with my fellow man, complete with gum drop smiles and firm faith in my institutions. A truly brave new world

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

#323

Post by gedy »

falkensmaize wrote: post #321
gedy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly while I know everyone needs a job, just speed run all this crap and let the companies learn from making a big unmaintainable ball of mud. Don't make the bad situation work by putting in your good skills to fix things behind the scenes, after hours, etc.

Management has made it very clear that we’re still responsible for the code we push even if the llm wrote it. So there will be no blaming Claude when things fall apart.

My personal line is they can't say that if you force devs to use LLMs "and be quick about it"

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

#324

Post by mekael »

deadbabe wrote: post #248
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 hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when subsidies expire.

I’ve heard estimates of starting at 2k a month per person, and thats for the “normal” user-base

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

#325

Post by shimman »

butILoveLife wrote: post #171
suheilaaita wrote: post #166

I'm from an accounting/finance background and spent about 10 years in Big4. I was always into tech, but never software development because writing code (as I thought) takes years to master, and I had already chosen accounting. Fast forward to 2024 when I saw Cursor (the IDE coding agent tool). I immediately felt like this was going to be the way for someone like me. Back then, it was brutal. I'd fight with the models…

> it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. I used to think so. Then a customer made their own replacement for $600/mo software in 2 days. The guy was a marketer by training. I don't exaggerate. I saw it did the exact same things.

Can you say what kind of software the customer replaced?

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

#326

Post by mech422 »

joefourier wrote: post #264
kuboble wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it. When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days. I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.

I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory? E.g. void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int ( compar)(const void , const void* )); And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentat…

Yeah - but you have to be a good enough programmer to really understand the headers.. the 'bootstrapping' problem was real :-) Especially if you didn't live in a metropolitan/college area. My local library was really short on programming books - especially anything 'in depth'. Also, 'C' was considered a "professional's language" back then - so bookstores/libraries were more likely to have books on BASIC then 'C'

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

#327

Post by 0xcafefood »

logicchains wrote: post #319
0xcafefood wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose

What's the proof for that? What fundamental limitation of these large language models makes them unable to produce natural language? A lot of people see the high likelihood of ever increasing amounts of generated, no-effort content on the web as a real threat. You're saying that's impossible.

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

#328

Post by gedy »

deadbabe wrote: post #248
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 hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when subsidies expire.

They'll just skip raises and say it's part of your comp for increasing your productivity or some tone-deaf BS

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

#330

Post by gedy »

andoando wrote: post #98
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.

There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do. Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for elvenlabs

You might be comparing people who know how to do something vs those who don't.
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