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The Last Programmers?

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Re: The Last Programmers?

#71

Post by tfandango »

GuB-42 wrote: post #43

> We're the last generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand. Our children will describe what they want and watch it appear on screen, the same way we describe what we want to search engines and watch results appear. Describing what you want is programming! Code is great for that because it is more precise and less ambiguous than natural languages. The part about search engines is missing a key element…

Yep, I am surprised by this whole vibe coding phenomenon. I find it imprecise, and I have to very carefully translate what I want into English, a very imprecise language with a lot of nuance. Either I spend a lot of time coming up with a good prompt, or I iterate with the AI (both of which I find take away from the joy of programming). I joke that we need some sort of logical language which we can write for the computer to understand...

I do like AI as a tool, it's great at a lot of things, but it not the panacea that so many believe, especially CEOs unfortunately.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#72

Post by tempodox »

thiago_fm wrote: post #20

I tried the Claude Code thing and the generated code is utter garbage. Also, it fails to iterate on complex features. If you are just creating CRUDs, it may work. But even on CRUD scenarios I've seen it completely lose context and use wrong values and things go broke in ways that are hard to track or update. I'm surprised people work with it and say those things. Are they really using the same tool I use? I'm sure th…

Consider the possibility that much of the success stories are just astroturfing.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#73

Post by tempodox »

jennyholzer wrote: post #27
quantiq wrote: post #9

> The only bottleneck is mdoel (sic) speed and quality. But with billions of dollars pouring into generative AI every year, we will see instant voice-to-code capabilities + bug-free quality in 2-5 years. Anytime I think the AI bubble can't go any higher I'm reminded of the fact there are people who genuinely believe this. These are the people boardrooms are listening to despite the evidence for actual developer produ…

What are these people going to do when the bubble pops? What happens when the money goes away and they realize they've been duped into joining a cult?

They won’t realize, and they will do what they are doing now already: Insist on being absolutely right anyway. The AI told them so!

Re: The Last Programmers?

#74

Post by mikewarot »

pferde wrote: post #13

We're doomed, when even supposed experts, working on these "AI" tools can't help but anthropomorphize those tools. "when edge cases emerge that the AI didn't anticipate" The only "anticipation" that is happening within those tools is on token level, the tools have no idea (and are fundamentally unable to even have an idea) what the code is even supposed to do in the real world.

>The only "anticipation" that is happening within those tools is on token level

When you were composing your reply, did you just start typing, then edit and compose your thoughts better a few times before hitting the reply button?

I ask, because that's what I do. Most of the time, I never know what the next word is going to be, I just start typing. Sometimes I'll think it out, or even type out a whole screed until I run out of thoughts... then review it several times before hitting "reply".

By your logic, I'm no more advanced than any other LLM. I think there's a serious misunderstanding of the depths at which the internal state of the LLM is maintained across token outputs. It's just doing the same thing I do (and I suspect most other people do, which is decide then make up a convincing story that agrees with the decision, on a word by word basis)

Other times, when I'm trying to explain something technical or complex, there's a word, or a name I can't remember... it drives me nuts, if I'm in a hurry, I'll just use a synonym that's almost as good, and work around it. Yesterday, for example, it took a while to I remember the name Christopher Walken via the Fat Boy slim video on YouTube.

The only difference is we have the ability to edit it first, before the all powerful "reply" button. Then of course, there's edit... but that's like agentic LLMs.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#75

Post by majewsky »

jennyholzer wrote: post #27
quantiq wrote: post #9

> The only bottleneck is mdoel (sic) speed and quality. But with billions of dollars pouring into generative AI every year, we will see instant voice-to-code capabilities + bug-free quality in 2-5 years. Anytime I think the AI bubble can't go any higher I'm reminded of the fact there are people who genuinely believe this. These are the people boardrooms are listening to despite the evidence for actual developer produ…

What are these people going to do when the bubble pops? What happens when the money goes away and they realize they've been duped into joining a cult?

They just move over to the next things. A lot of the current crop of AI grifters were NFT and shitcoin grifters before that.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#76

Post by mikewarot »

As someone done with the need to code for a living, I think it's both sad, and good, that we don't have to content with machines with a few K of RAM, and cassette storage (or worse yet, toggle switches and punch cards/paper tape) ((or worse yet, wiring up ENIAC, a process that sometimes took days between setup and debugging)) (((or worse yet, figuring out how to arrange all the IBM punch card machines to do math for the Manhattan project)))

or people running mechanical calculators

or people doing math by hand

or people doing math without zeros and the decimal point.

Yes, it's sad that a skill might be subsumed into the technology stack. But do any of us miss having to really, REALLY understand what's involved in creating/sending IP packets across ethernet, or WiFi?

Sure, the tools are unreliable, but they'll get better over time. There will still be people trying to eek out the last bit of performance, or get rid of another byte of code, the Demo scene will live forever, in some fashion. It just won't be a work requirement any more.

We're the accountants manually recomputing spreadsheets on paper. We call ourselves "Software Engineers", well, now it's time to actually Engineer Software.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#77

Post by fragmede »

germandiago wrote: post #39

Poor the people/assistants that make mistakes when they have to fit, intrgrate and modify all AI-written code. My experience is always that there is a complexity threshold at which things start to take longer, not shorter, with the use of AI. This is not one-off scripts or small programs. But when you have systems that touch a lot of context, different languages and parts of the stack, IA sucks for how to design that…

> Give any AI any atypical problem and you will see it spit big hallucinations.

So don't give it atypical problems. Hammers are really bad at driving in screws.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#78

Post by fragmede »

photonthug wrote: post #54

> There are two camps emerging, and the difference isn't really about skill level or experience. Assuming everything else the author believes is true, the real camps are "money" and "less money". Those camps already determine the success of businesses to a large extent. But especially in SWE where we traditionally cared less about degrees and more about skill, it's a new thing that "skill" and "experience" are direct…

If the problem with bought army commissions is that they turned out to be incompetent for actually leading people into battle, but that the corresponding scenario in software is "are you conscious enough to feed things into ChatGPT", and their GitHub portfolio shows that they are, and then they are, where is the problem? Are we just invoking the spectre of fallen comrades in battle as an emotional plea?

Re: The Last Programmers?

#79

Post by photonthug »

fragmede wrote: post #78
photonthug wrote: post #54

> There are two camps emerging, and the difference isn't really about skill level or experience. Assuming everything else the author believes is true, the real camps are "money" and "less money". Those camps already determine the success of businesses to a large extent. But especially in SWE where we traditionally cared less about degrees and more about skill, it's a new thing that "skill" and "experience" are direct…

If the problem with bought army commissions is that they turned out to be incompetent for actually leading people into battle, but that the corresponding scenario in software is "are you conscious enough to feed things into ChatGPT", and their GitHub portfolio shows that they are, and then they are, where is the problem? Are we just invoking the spectre of fallen comrades in battle as an emotional plea?

> where is the problem?

Honestly, if you have to ask then you'll probably not understand the answer, but here's some related questions to ponder. What's the problem with having money in politics as much as possible? What's the problem with eliminating all leadership with relevant domain-expertise, replacing it with people who know how to "play the game"? What's the problem with class-based societies in general? What's the problem with ignoring all fundamentals, denying expertise can even exist, and just full on embracing superficial optics everywhere? We've been in the fuck-around phase for a while now, but we're moving closer to the find-out phase.

> Are we just invoking the spectre of fallen comrades in battle as an emotional plea?

No. The emotional plea would be that IT and SWE actually created upward mobility for a lot of talented people who otherwise would not have been able to buy their way into the American middle class without, for example, joining the army to risk death for the benefit of elites. It will be sad to see backwards movement on that for sure, but we don't even need to invoke this argument.

The more rational argument is simply that meritocracy works better than classism. Even if you're fine with feeding people into the meat grinder on the off chance you get some personal glory, it's not just bad for the victims, it's bad for general morale, the army, the country involved, etc. Substitute these words with money/markets/shareholders/industry or whatever if it helps you to understand.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#80

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Programming used to look like “lots of typing” but that’s never what it was.

Programming is (to a rough approximation) turning fuzzy specs from humans into well crafted solutions that solve a problem. Sometimes using code.

We are in a new era of computing where probabilistic AND deterministic machines can be built and put to use by humans.

That’s super exciting!

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