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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?

#411

Post by ori_b »

rjh29 wrote: post #398
ori_b wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doordash has also enabled home cooks; they no longer have to worry about smashing together ingredients by hand to make dinner. They just prompt the app to make them the food they want. Doordash is the future of home cooking.

Prepackaged pasta sauces and cake mix. Worse than making it from scratch but enables people with no time to cook more dishes. Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.

I suggest you stop paying Anthropic, and see how much code gets written. You're absolutely paying someone else to do it for you.

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

#412

Post by ivraatiems »

I always find these "death of the X" articles frustrating.

Books didn't stop existing when the radio came out. Radio didn't stop existing when television was invented. If you go back in time a thousand years, people were complaining that an increase in literacy would damaging peoples' memorization skills.

People will still write code for consumption by other humans by hand. Some companies, though probably not most, will still prefer it. AI will change the industry - IS changing the industry - but things don't "end". They just look different, or are less popular.

There is enough for us to worry about and try to figure out how to respond to without the histrionics.

Also, on a related note, "Idiots are vibecoding bad stuff" is not the same as "engineers are using AI tools to do good work more quickly," and we should stop conflating it.

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

#413

Post by wsve »

IanCal wrote: post #383
wsve wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woodworking analogy for AI is not "power tools vs handsaw", its "power tools vs. wood 3D printer". You don't do any of the creating, you only ideate and allow the machine to do all the creating. It's simply not wood working anymore. Its something else entirely

You don’t have to choose between entirely hand coded and entirely AI built code.

I cannot choose entirely hand-made code, I don't think I'll even be able to choose 50% hand-made code, because my manager will say "why aren't you just using the 3D Wood Printer 9000? Jeff is building house frames 5x faster than you, you need to get with the program or we're gonna let you go"

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

#414

Post by j3k3 »

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…

Why do you make such statements with confidence and bluster?

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

#415

Post by j3k3 »

jcranmer wrote: post #43
CollinEMac wrote: post #26

>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 wa…

Nailed it.

The design part is hard because you have to envision the object. Once you have a good idea and conceptialisation of the object, form is easy.

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

#416

Post by j3k3 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #354
bluefirebrand wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking... You know. Chores. Not my software, I actually enjoy building that

You can enjoy doing woodworking without power tools but that's irrelevant to a job where people want it done fast with power tools.

Except a power tool works as it should each and every time. 100% reproducible. That's what's so great about it.

Can we stop with the lazy analogies? Everyone's read some variant of this on here by now. Come up with something that's genius to read.

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

#417

Post by wsve »

IanCal wrote: post #400
wsve wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I feel. I knew it already to an extent from my time in college, but so many people come into this industry because they want to be able to produce the end product, or just have a stable job that makes good money. Neither of those are bad reasons to get into this profession, but it does make me sad how few peers I have who do programming because they're passionate about the act of programming. The…

Aside from many of these things just being a layer difference - it’s not unreasonable to want to work on databases query optimisation an not enjoy css or enjoy building frontends but just want a db that’s fast and works. The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.

> Aside from many of these things just being a layer difference - it’s not unreasonable to want to work on databases query optimisation an not enjoy css or enjoy building frontends but just want a db that’s fast and works.

I don't mean that it's unsetting that people enjoy different parts of the job, I enjoy many of those same aspects, but it's sad to me how few people around me care about the aspect that I originally fell in love with, which was the bedrock of our profession. Specifically, the work of solving problems with the machine/human shared language of code, instead of just writing out plain-english specs of what you want to have happen.

> The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.

So what? Their "just get it done" POV is far more common in this industry than mine (apparently), and the enjoyment they get from their job isn't being actively optimized away.

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

#418

Post by j3k3 »

AStrangeMorrow wrote: post #376
galactus wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We do lose something, but really I still see it as an extension of autocomplete. I had some pieces of code I wrote I was quite proud of: well documented, clear code yet clever designs and algorithm. But really what always mattered most to me was designing the solution. Then the coding part, even though I take some pride in the code I write, was most a mean to an end. Especially once I start having to add things like…

To me its just a natural evolution of the search engine.

And now looking back its an obvious outcome. The search engine of the time was the best way to find websites. But those websites grew in quantity and volume over time with information.. that information as we know is/was a vital input for LLMs.

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

#419

Post by rjh29 »

ori_b wrote: post #411
rjh29 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepackaged pasta sauces and cake mix. Worse than making it from scratch but enables people with no time to cook more dishes. Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.

I suggest you stop paying Anthropic, and see how much code gets written. You're absolutely paying someone else to do it for you.

I pay Google £15/month and have never hit the usage limit. But thanks anyway.

edit: I think you might mean vibe coding (and those infamous things that use millions of tokens with no limit) but for programmers using LLMs to code is literally just a tool like anything else and the cost is barely relevant. It's not comparable to contracting out code, and it's not even comparable to eating out in terms of cost!

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