[HN Gopher] A New AI Worry: Many Young Coders No Longer Know How...
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A New AI Worry: Many Young Coders No Longer Know How Their Code
Works
Author : namanyayg
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-03-03 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inc.com)
| acuozzo wrote:
| Where did all of this trust come from?
|
| When I first started hacking I had the expectation that every
| chunk of code I came across was broken in some way.
|
| All of the software I relied upon was broken in some visible way.
| My Windows 95 installation would have multiple kernel panics per
| day. My Usenet reader would fail catastrophically when
| encountering non-ASCII text. My CD-ROM copies of games would
| freeze until I kicked the side of the computer which consistently
| worked.
|
| I still see bugs everywhere nowadays, but they're more hidden
| and, honestly more frustrating since they're so opaque.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| If you try to do this in a work context, you'll be told you are
| wasting time. Even if you aren't fired, you will not be
| considered for promotion: the way to do that is to have "a lot
| of impact". This means shipping a lot of half-baked stuff. The
| other piece of the puzzle you need is having good "work ethic".
| This is best demonstrated via late-night debugging heroics
| where you patch up the crud you shipped earlier while getting
| "impact" points. For whatever reason people who run companies
| believe that their customers wants "lots of crud quickly"
| instead of quality products.
| JohnFen wrote:
| How true that is depends entirely on what sort of company
| you're working for. It may be common with SV-style companies
| (and it shows), but it's not nearly as common in the rest of
| the software world.
| specificanxiety wrote:
| When we decoupled results from capital. It doesn't matter how
| buggy your software is if people are forced to use it anyway,
| especially if you haven't turned a profit in ten years but you
| still get VC money anyway.
|
| Remember when "running a business" meant "making a good product
| and making some money in the process"? Yeah, me neither.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Why are we blaming VC for bad products? There are always very
| profitable companies consistently chunking out bad products.
| Sometimes it feels like quality and profit is inversely
| correlated
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Personally I fail to see how this worry can be 'new'.
|
| A 'new' transportation worry: many car drivers don't know where
| to turn or even where they are heading without GPS.
| specificanxiety wrote:
| I mean, LLMs are new. And if you can't see the difference
| between an entire profession using broken, hallucinatory
| tooling to write buggy code, and drivers using more convenient
| maps, then I'm not sure how to help.
| joemazerino wrote:
| When GPS coordinates are handled by LLM the fear won't be as
| novel.
| roxolotl wrote:
| This is true of all levels of abstraction. The next question is:
| does this level of abstraction cost more than it's worth.
| specificanxiety wrote:
| Turns out, knowing stuff is important when you try to do stuff
| that you claim to be an expert in, instead of outsourcing it to a
| crappy incorrect tutorial generator. Competitive edge for
| computer programmers going forward: knowing how computers work.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| wont matter once the agents code review the agent-generated code
| lxgr wrote:
| If that happens, it'll presumably matter somewhat when it comes
| to continued employment of said coders.
| mdlarson wrote:
| Did young coders ever know how their code worked?
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(page generated 2025-03-03 23:01 UTC)