>but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?
And was true before AI
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?
#42You 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.
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.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#43>but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?
I'd expect that probably less than 10% of my time is spent actually writing code, and not because of AI, but because enough of it is spent analyzing failures, reading documents, participating in meetings, putting together presentations, answering questions, reading code, etc. And even when I have a nice, uninterrupted coding session, I still spend a decent fraction of that time thinking through the design of how I want the change rather than actually writing the code to effect that change.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#44I keep getting stuck on the liability problem of this supposed "new world". If we take this as far as it goes: AI agent societies that designs, architects, and maintains the entire stack E2E with little to no oversight. What happens when rogue AIs do bad things? Who is responsible? You have to have fireable senior engineers that understand deep fundamentals to make sure things aren't going awry, right? /s
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#45You 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.
AI assisted code can't even stick to the API documentation, especially if the data structures are not consistent and have evolved over time. You would see Claude literally pulling function after function from thin air, desperately trying to fulfill your complicated business logic and even when it's complete, it doesn't look neat at all. Yes, it will have test coverage, but one more feature request will probably break the back of the camel. And if you raise that PR to the rest of your team, good luck trying to summarise it all to your colleagues.
However if you just have an easy project, or a greenfield project, or don't care about who's going to maintain that stuff in 6 months, sure, go all in with AI.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#46Because 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.
A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y", over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one is.
Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#47Another trash article from the New York Times, who financially benefit from this type of content because of their ongoing litigation against OpenAI. I think the assumption that developers don't code is wrong. Most software engineers don't even want to code, they are opportunists looking to make money. I have yet to experience this cliff of coding. These people aren't asking for hard enough questions. I have a bunch o…
Agreed - just like the Fortune article talking about (Edit: Morgan Stanley, not GS) saying "the AI revolution is coming next year, and will decimate tons of industries, and no one is ready for it". They quote Altman and Musk. Gee - what did you expect from those two snake-oil salesmen?
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#48Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes.
But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds)
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.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#49You 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.
I don't have as many years of professional experience as you do, but IMO code pissing is one of the areas LLMs and "agentic tools" shine the least.
In both personal projects and $dayjob tasks, the highest time-saving AI tasks were:
- "review this feature branch" (containing hand-written commits)
- "trace how this repo and repo located at ~/foobar use {stuff} and how they interact with each other, make a Mermaid diagram"
- "reverse engineer the attached 50MiB+ unstripped ELF program, trace all calls to filesystem functions; make a table with filepath, caller function, overview of what caller does" (the table is then copy-pasted to Confluence)
- basic YAML CRUD
Also while Anthropic has more market share in B2B, their model seems optimized for frontend, design, and literary work rather than rigorous work; I find it to be the opposite with their main competitor.
Claude writes code rife with safety issues/vulns all the time, or at least more than other models.
Re: Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
#50This 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.
Do we know it increased the velocity and didnt just churn more slop?
Even before AI the limiting factor on all of the teams I ever worked on was bad decisions, not how much time it took to write code. There seem to be more of those these days.