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

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

#361

Post by polishdude20 »

doug_durham wrote: post #338
arcxi wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know if it's "hate" rather than "a means to an ends". I love learning new languages, and coding. But it was always a means to an ends. The dopamine hit always came from seeing the project compile and do something.

Yeah and especially the satisfaction that you were able to make a user delighted to use your thing. Fixing bugs, making things faster, adding new features, for me personally I do it because I feels really good when a customer loves to use the thing I've built.

Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.

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

#362

Post by InfamousRece »

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.

I’d love to outsource all the boring, tedious parts of my job to LLM. Unfortunately it is the upper management who decide which parts of my job are boring.

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

#363

Post by satvikpendem »

sph wrote: post #310
bluefirebrand wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fools errand We are paid to do the tedious stuff because it is tedious. If we actually ever succeed in automating away the tedious stuff, we're out of work

Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day. I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions. Isn’t the future great?

This but unironically. We're at a point where there is still a gap between what managers expect and how fast AI can work. I genuinely do have days where I finish a few tickets and I'm done.

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

#364

Post by Ygg2 »

dmd wrote: post #350
Ygg2 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.

I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.

True, but motivations for mass production also are motivations for making things worse off overall.

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

#365

Post by sieste »

galactus wrote: post #342
barnabee wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like designing data, algorithms, and systems. I like picking the right tools for the job. I like making architectural and user interface (CLI, configuration format, GUI, whatever) decisions. Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making things. So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm…

I think reducing what LLMs do to « typing » is misleading. If it was just typing, you could simply use speech-to-text. But LLMs do far more than that, they shape the code itself. And I think we lose something when we delegate that work to LLMs

The art is to decide when shaping the code yourself is worth your time. Not only financially but also experience gain and job satisfaction.

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

#366

Post by DennisP »

sph wrote: post #360
DennisP wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you've had three replies so far that didn't notice your sarcasm. But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them be…

I do not believe that past performance is a guarantee of future results. The era of well paid programmers in great demand is pretty much over, and it’s not only because of AI. Even if machines are dumb enough they require supervision, the big bosses do not care and will always prefer the dumb machine if it saves them money vs hiring a junior dev. It means the poor sods that supervise these machines will have to work…

Maybe that'll happen one day, but it hasn't so far. As of this month, Glassdoor reports the median total pay for software developers across all industries and experience levels as $149K.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

satvikpendem wrote: post #363
sph wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day. I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions. Isn’t the future great?

This but unironically. We're at a point where there is still a gap between what managers expect and how fast AI can work. I genuinely do have days where I finish a few tickets and I'm done.

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by nativeit »

So you’ve vibe coded an app. That’s just swell. You want to release it? Don’t. You can’t support it. You can’t update it. You are one bad prompt away from it collapsing.

We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and soon.

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

#369

Post by cyberpunk »

LadyCailin wrote: post #187
leptons wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm still very happy with what we got "One person's slop is another person's treasure" I'm not all that impressed with "AI". I often "race" the AI by giving it a task to do, and then I start coding my own solution in parallel. I often beat the AI, or deliver a better result. Artificial Intelligence is like artificial flavoring. It's cheap and tastes passable to most people, but real flavors are far better in every w…

At their current stage, this feels like the wrong way to use them. I use them fully supervised, (despite the fact that feels like I’m fighting the tools), which is kind of the best of both worlds. I review every line of code before I allow the edit, and if something is wrong, I tell it to fix it. It learns over time, especially as I set rules in memories, and so the process has sped up, to the point that this goes wa…

The happy path for me is with erlang, due to the concurrency model the blast radius of an error is exceptionally small, so the programming style is to let things crash if they go wrong. So, really you are writing the happy path code only (most of the time). Combine this approach with some very robust tests (does this thing pass the tests / behave how we need it to?) then you’re close to the point of not really caring about the implementation at all.

Of course, i still do, but i could see not caring being possible down the road with such architectures..

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

#370

Post by GorbachevyChase »

notpachet wrote: post #292
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always code by hand as a hobby. If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thin…

> at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers I don't think this is the flex you think it is... in my experience, the bottom 10% of programmers are actively harmful and should never be allowed near your codebase.

Quite a few people think that about Claude code. I disagree with them, personally, but I think we can agree that AI code generation is qualitatively at least as good as the worst human professionals. I think we would also probably agree that the state of the art today is not as good as the very best.

The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I would say that state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output.

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