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

Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 575 posts

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#461

Post by djeastm »

nunez wrote: post #455
jp57 wrote: post #237

I fall into the category of senior engineers who benefit from LLMs for all the reasons mentioned in this post. I find it's possible to agree completely with sentiments like this and still feel as if this is all written in the sand below the high tide line, and ten years from now nobody will care about this. Horsemanship and sailing were both specialized skills of high value to society, and now they're not. But in eac…

Uhhhh sailing is still an extremely valuable skill? Think piloting cargo ships, cruise lines (for non-American pilots), marine equipment...

I think they might mean literally sailing. With sails.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#462

Post by cameronh90 »

ryeights wrote: post #440
ben_w wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding My claim is just that LLMs are basically fine now with the "coding" part. Not so much with development, definitely not with engineering.

Outside of the most niche domains like frontier AI development, are there software engineering questions that Sol 5.6/Fable 5 can't answer better than the median software engineer if explicitly asked? It strikes me that models already have superhuman software architecture capabilities, they are simply underelicited. Furthermore the AI companies are spending gobs of money and compute to address this—harness developmen…

In terms of getting a the consensus answer to a specific question, they're likely better than a median software engineer at most questions.

Where they still fall massively short, even compared to a straight out of college junior developer, is figuring out what the correct question to ask is.

This has led to situations like Fable 5 spending six days debugging a deadlock because it didn't think to add any observability to detect when the job stalls, and would wait until the job timed out each time. Any junior developer would have fixed it in a few mins, but I left Fable running out of curiosity to see how long it'd take.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#464

Post by zamadatix »

hintymad wrote: post #265
ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

Boris: "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops prompting Claude and figuring what to do". Boris: "I haven’t written a line of code by hand in, I think, eight months now… Claude Code, 100% written by Claude Code". Boris: "There’s no manually written code anywhere at the company… All of the SQL is written by models. Everything is just built by the models... Claude instances communicate with each other (e.g., over…

Where I'm at we use Claude for many coding tasks but we don't have infinite token pockets like Anthropic does. Everything is very focused on how to get the most out of the tokens and prove you're the one who deserves to have a ton extra granted next month. We can't afford things like have one guy tossing the equivalent in $165k at 64 simultaneous instances for days on end to just see if a Rust rewrite really works well or not like they did with Bun - but Anthropic still did that regardless. This doesn't prove the opposite either, it just appears asking whether or not others are doing the same is a bad oracle for Anthropic's honesty here.

I think that will be one of the most interesting things with models in the future. Even if we somehow 100% stopped dead where they are from a a model perspective, being able to run it twice and fast for half the price in the future will enable a hell of a lot more practical usage.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#465

Post by Seattle3503 »

roblh wrote: post #378
LandoCalrissian wrote: post #54

The snake eating it's own tail for llm software development has really been met with a shoulder shrug whenever it gets brought up. At best you might have a small cohort of developers that don't cook their brains with AI and their reward for that appears to be having to review terrible AI code written by people who have cooked their brains. Completely unsustainable.

Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple mont…

Where do you work where there isn't pressure to use agents?

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#467

Post by throwatdem12311 »

ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

Imagine hiring a carpenter and then telling him if he’s using a tablesaw instead of a hammer he’s doing it wrong.

He would call you a moron.

He might even just fire you as a customer if you annoyed him enough.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#468

Post by Rumple22Stilk »

ryeights wrote: post #440
ben_w wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding My claim is just that LLMs are basically fine now with the "coding" part. Not so much with development, definitely not with engineering.

Outside of the most niche domains like frontier AI development, are there software engineering questions that Sol 5.6/Fable 5 can't answer better than the median software engineer if explicitly asked? It strikes me that models already have superhuman software architecture capabilities, they are simply underelicited. Furthermore the AI companies are spending gobs of money and compute to address this—harness developmen…

Google can also answer it better than most if explicitly asked.

An explicit query returns a specific answer, but means nothing about whether it can use that knowledge to create better software.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#470

Post by monkaiju »

roblh wrote: post #378
LandoCalrissian wrote: post #54

The snake eating it's own tail for llm software development has really been met with a shoulder shrug whenever it gets brought up. At best you might have a small cohort of developers that don't cook their brains with AI and their reward for that appears to be having to review terrible AI code written by people who have cooked their brains. Completely unsustainable.

Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple mont…

Same here! The slight difference being I'll just do something else for money and code purely for fun if hand written code stops being economically viable. I'll highly confident that won't happen though.
Post reply on HN