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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?

#451

Post by kuboble »

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…

I don't remember where we got the compilers from but we surely didn't buy them.

Also I don't know if it came with manual but my English wasn't good enough to read them anyways.

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

#452

Post by famouswaffles »

chmod775 wrote: post #92
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially when you have to work out how and why the AI-generated code is structured the way it is. You could just ask it? Or you don’t trust the AI to answer you honestly?

You're anthropomorphizing. LLMs can't lie nor can they tell the truth. These concepts just don't apply to them. They also cannot tell you what they were "thinking" when they wrote a piece of code. If you "ask" them what they were thinking, you just get a plausible response, not the "intention" that may or may not have existed in some abstract form in some layer when the system selected tokens*. That information is go…

>You're anthropomorphizing.

That is fine. You should, and you'll get the best results doing so.

>LLMs can't lie nor can they tell the truth. These concepts just don't apply to them

Nobody really knows exactly what concepts do and don't apply to them. We simply don't have a great enough understanding of the internal procedures of a trained model.

Ultimately this is all irrelevant. There are multiple indications that the same can be said for humanity, that we perform actions and then rationalize them away even without realizing it. That explanations are often if not always post-hoc rationalizations, lies we tell even ourselves. There's evidence for it. And yet, those explanations can still be useful. And I'm sure OP was trying to point out that is also the case for LLMs.

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

#453

Post by not_that_d »

I am now using LLM at 100% at work and producing faster code, while I keep growing my regular skills privately in "old way".

Why? Because when the bubble burst and the companies (including mine) can not pay the 400% price increase and go bankrupt, then I still have keep my brain active and still can do stuff without or less tokens.

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

#454

Post by DennisP »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #442
DennisP wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If demand for developers is shrinking then you'd expect salaries to go down.

If you can prove otherwise, show some stats.

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

#455

Post by socalgal2 »

allreduce wrote: post #148
ipnon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?

It commoditizes software construction. The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill. This is democratization. Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some am…

You might be right but it's common to see that take as short sighted since there is zero evidence it's ever happened before. The common example is the loom. The loom didn't democritize cloth making, it put all the weavers out of business. But it did democritize everything that needed cloth because cloth became cheap. 1000s more jobs were created by making cloth cheap. In a similar way, 1000s of different jobs might be created by making software creation cheap, but just like cloth makers, software makers have no purpose when making software is easy.

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

#456

Post by zamalek »

I find that the perception of AI coding is very bimodal, and both camps have it wrong. You have the one camp who will only trust it to, at most, write a few lines of code. The other camp prompts, walks always, and pushes (or just has the AI do it).

I believe both camps it frustratingly wrong. If you haven't yet given it a chance at doing something substantial, then at least _try_ it once. On the other side of the coin, that first experience where it does something 80% right is intoxicating, but AI doesn't reason and can't get it 100% right - it can't even multiply relatively small numbers.

The former camp is going to get left behind and won't be able to compete, the latter camp is one prompt away from a disaster.

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

#457

Post by killingtime74 »

FuckButtons wrote: post #335
dorfsmay wrote: post #260

For me, the biggest shift is people who don't care about local AI. The idea that you can no longer code without paying a tax to one of the billion $ backed company isn't sitting well.

I don’t understand why more people aren’t focused on how to get the benefits of ai but on your own machine. If the last 20 years of software transitioning off of our desktops and into the cloud has taught us anything, it’s that letting corporate entities run the software you rely on end to end gives you: worse software with more bugs, surveillance and subscriptions. Why on earth would you want that for everything you…

If there's a model that's as good as Claude 4.5 (not even 4.6) I would pay tens of thousands to run it locally. To my knowledge there isn't yet. Benchmarks may say so but I haven't used one that does yet. I always try new models that come out on openrouter

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

#458

Post by in_cahoots »

leptons wrote: post #311
in_cahoots wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.

Great, and you've taught him to never learn to code. That's not as great an achievment as you might think it is.

Yes, I've doomed him all because of a 30 minute interaction. Just like when he watched Kerbal Space Program videos on YouTube he lost all motivation to get to the moon himself. Oh wait.

And he definitely doesn't make up missions using the mission builder using if / then loops. He'll never learn to code. Oh the humanity.

I'd rather have my kid typing on a real keyboard into Claude, asking questions about what Python, and modifying the Claude-generated code than watching random videos and playing Roblox on his iPad.

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

#459

Post by dang »

habinero wrote: post #439
coldtea wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.

Tell me you're not a SWE without telling me. Engineers hire engineers at tech companies. Managers do the hiring paperwork.

Can you please stop posting so abrasively? It's not that this one comment is so bad, but you have a long pattern of doing so, and we're trying for something else here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#460

Post by xtracto »

fastforwardius wrote: post #132
xtracto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I (well, the AI) just wrote a Rust app to merge two (huge, GB of data) tables by discovering columns with data in common based on text distance (levenshtein and Dice) . It worked beautifully An i have NEVER made one line of Rust. I dont understand nay-sayers, to me the state of gen.AI is like the simpsons quote "worst day so far". Look were we are within 5 years of the first real GPT/LLM. The next 5 yea…

I seem to remember doing it in SQL (EDIT_DISTANCE) 20ish years ago. While I wouldn't say it worked beautifully, I also didn't need to make a single line of Rust :) also no more than 2 line s of SQL were needed.

Edit_distance uses pure levenstein which is quadratic, so for tables of 500k rows and 20+ columns each it will slowdown to a crawl. Without going into a lot of detail, I needed this to work for datasets of that size. So a lot of "trick" optimization and pre-processing has to be done.

Otherwise simple merges in pandas or sql/duckdb would had sufficed.

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