Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 469 posts

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

#441

Post by ripe »

kittikitti wrote: post #12

Another 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…

I agree that the article is a poor take on AI in programming. However, I wouldn't blame NYT for corrupt journalism. This is an op-ed, not something written by NYT staff.

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

#442

Post by paulryanrogers »

DennisP wrote: post #366
sph wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

That doesn't yet capture the shrinking of the market, especially for juniors.

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

#443

Post by paulryanrogers »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #268
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.

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…

> I just wish all the moaning would end.

It can be unpleasant to participate in a community of differing opinions and experiences. I still think it's worth showing up. If I hadn't then your perspective would have been missed too.

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

#444

Post by ricardorivaldo »

ori_b wrote: post #252
rjh29 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

There are much nore than 2 types of programers, one you forgot are the ones who just need the job and any tool that helps is welcome, also, there the ones that don't care for anything and does programming just because is the only thing that's available to jot work on sales or burger flipping, and the list goes on

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

#445

Post by ricardorivaldo »

falkensmaize wrote: post #318
rjh29 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For now it matters, but how long ? Context window will keep increasing and soon ai will be able to take care of all our codebase

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

#447

Post by Certify7513 »

I asked one of my friends to show me his video conversion application which worked via a web frontend. The instant I opened it my CPU fans started spinning so I checked and the page was using 300% CPU because it was updating the background gradient on an invisible element, in JavaScript, every frame, as fast as possible. That was very entertaining.

As far as the end of computer programming goes...

Step 1. Wow, I just vibe coded an application and it works! I'm going to write a blog about it and tell everyone how awesome AI is, much hype

Step 2. Vibe coded application faces inevitable problems, the perfect application is a fairytale after all. The only way to "fix" the application is spam tokens at the problem and pray.

Step 3. Author does not write a new blog post to report on this eventuality... probably because they feel embarrassed about how optimistic they were

Step 4. Perhaps author manages to fix application, awesome... then what about a year from now, author needs to update the application because a dependency has a security problem. The application is so needlessly complex that they don't even know when to begin.

Step 5. They boot up Claude Code, which their business is now 100% dependent on, but they're charging 10x the original cost per token. It's not like they have a contract, so user has to either eat the cost or give up

Step 6. User tries local model on their 1080 ti but they can barely run entry-level models

Step 7. Woops

Personally I think it's impossible to convince these people, the results will speak for themselves eventually.

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

#448

Post by chocolatemario »

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.

It’s hard for me to believe that, unless you’re just doing simple glue work or you’re working in a low stakes environments, anyone is just delegating everything to agents. If you’re working on a migration (common in enterprise infrastructure work), you’re familiar with the needless abstractions, and it’s something you’ve done many times over; agents can certainly expedite change. If you’re building anything with depth and you do not have a clear understanding of the underpinning logic, you’re either very gifted in your ability to reason about abstractions or you’re setting yourself for a failure at some point in the future. You need expertise at some point. Programming/debugging as a means of learning a domain is akin to writing as a means of clarifying your thoughts.

That being said, yea enterprise coding can be extremely mundane and it’s setup for learning it deeply then finding a way to do it faster. I’m likely in the 90% range of my work being done by Claude, but I’m working in a domain I’ve got years of experience with hand coding and stepping through code in my debugger.

I think this latter piece is the challenge I’m struggling with. There is an endless amount of work that can be done at my company but as long as the economy is in a weird spot, I’m being led to believe that ai is making me expendable. This is a consequence of the fact that glue work represents 80% of my output (not value). The other 20% of time at work is exploring ideas without guaranteed results, its aligning stakeholders, its testing feasibility with mvps or experts from another area I need some help with. If glue work represents tangible output and conceptual work is something that may not actually have value my manager wants me to explore it, I’m just a glue guy in enterprise while I’m left chasing the dragon of a cool project for me to really sink my teeth into. That project is just a half baked bad idea from someone disconnected with reality. Glue work is measurable in LoC (however useless a metric it is measurable) and it’s certainly paying the bills.

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

#449

Post by rkagerer »

Otek wrote: post #436
rkagerer wrote: post #435

Is anyone concerned how dependant the industry as it's described here is becoming on one, two or three service providers who take prompts and spit out tokens? And the amount of your proprietary infrastructure you're exposing to them? Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Or are there good options for those who'd rather own the capability than rent it?

> Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Cloud providers will always be able to offer more performance and more powerful options.

I don't know, I could envision a situation where investing enough capital in hardware to be able to generate "infinite" tokens for free (or close to that) might open up possibilities not economically practical otherwise. Especially once the incumbents run out of hype / investor money to burn and start raising their prices to push revenue in line with their enormous expenditures.

Also, presumably at some point far in the future we'll reach a technological asymptote and factors like latency may start to play a bigger role, at least for some applications.

I grant that training data is crucial distinguishing factor that may never become competitive in-house.

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

#450

Post by famouswaffles »

notpachet wrote: post #440
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand how: > the state of the art today is not as good as the very best and > state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output are not contradictory. If the models completely surpass any individual's productive output, doesn't that mean they're better than the best humans? Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "surpassing productive output." Are you talking about raw q…

>are not contradictory. If the models completely surpass any individual's productive output, doesn't that mean they're better than the best humans?

It would be contradictory if we were talking about a human sure, but we're not. We're talking about a machine that can read thousands of words in seconds and spit thousands in slightly longer.

>Are you talking about raw quantity over quality? I mean, yeah... but I could also do that with a bash script.

Well except you can't. You can't replace what LLMs can do with a bash script unless your bash script is calling some other LLM.

Post reply on HN