[HN Gopher] The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Elimin...
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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
Author : dinvlad
Score : 208 points
Date : 2026-02-25 05:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ivanturkovic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ivanturkovic.com)
| cjfd wrote:
| The article talks about 'software development will be
| democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The
| LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to
| train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The
| situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much
| more democratic.
| Havoc wrote:
| It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers-
| they can now make their own tools.
|
| What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I
| worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no
| longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already
| showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware
| makers
| ares623 wrote:
| They can rent their own tools, more like.
| Kinrany wrote:
| No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's
| tools in the process of making their own tools.
| ares623 wrote:
| They can continue renting to maintain the tools they
| make.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| One day people will not even be able to own computers
| anymore. They will be owned, controlled and rented out by
| corporate elites for limited purposes only. The personal
| computer will probably either cease to exist due to
| economic factors. It will probably be made illegal for
| citizens to own free computers. We'll probably need
| licenses to operate one.
|
| The mere concept of people "making their own tools" is
| just comical in this bleak timeline.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Not entirely true. For instance if I use LLMs to build an
| ios app I still need to pay apple $100 to use my own app
| for an undetermined amount of time.
|
| If I build a web app i still need to pay for a domain,
| for a server for egress.
|
| We are just renting. Wouldn't be surprised if in the
| future this gets even more depressing
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are
| bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on
| a long enough time line.
| Havoc wrote:
| The US losing the plot doesn't change the fact that the
| tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level.
|
| If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark
| holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental
| freedom gain an "individuals can make tools without knowing
| coding" isn't going anywhere
| ldng wrote:
| Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.
| kqr wrote:
| ... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time
| away from family and jobs.
|
| The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this
| learning less expensive for those with little of both time
| and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
| edgyquant wrote:
| You have to have a knack for it, most people are not
| programmer types
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think it's about being a "type" so much as
| choosing what to specialize in.
|
| I could learn plumbing skills and do the plumbing around
| my house. I've chosen not to.
| xg15 wrote:
| It's "democratizing" in the same way Uber "democratized"
| taxis...
| Kinrany wrote:
| Taxi became more accessible and reliable, didn't it
| cratermoon wrote:
| have you priced an Uber lately?
| tkel wrote:
| Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time.
| Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.
|
| Democracy is about governance, not access.
|
| A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users
| collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the
| companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Democracy is about governance, not access._
|
| It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of
| _democratize_ to describe _" more accessible"_ are documented
| in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
|
| https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-
| thesaur...
|
| https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
| mannykannot wrote:
| With the consequence that disambiguation may be needed.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is
| that LLMs are causing _software development_ to be
| democratized. As in, people who want software are more able
| to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites
| for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to
| govern what software other people can have.
|
| (Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow
| IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
| foo42 wrote:
| I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path
| forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something
| which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
| heliumtera wrote:
| You are assuming democracy wasn't designed to crush the
| individual and reduce autonomy at all cost. How cute.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| That's a great point but you didn't make your linux machine
| yourself. A large tech corp made it, and each of its parts.
| Some of us could probably make their own computers but I don't
| think I'd be able to make one smaller than the house I live in.
| There's something to be said about large-scale automation and
| that's not that it "democratizes" anything. Like you say: quite
| the opposite.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Yeah but this time it's for real.
|
| All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless
| conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically
| glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable
| enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it
| was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace.
|
| AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be
| ambiguous and not cover all the bases. And people are familiar
| with natural language. And it can fill in the missing details and
| disambiguate the others.
|
| This has been known to be possible for decades, as (simplifying a
| bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the engineer in
| natural, ambiguous language what to do and they will do it. Now
| the AI takes the place of the engineer.
|
| Also, _I_ personally never believed before AI that programming
| will disappear, so the argument that "this has been hyped
| before" doesn't touch my soul.
|
| I have no idea why this is so hard to understand. I'd like people
| to reply to me in addition to downvoting.
| danhau wrote:
| Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and
| growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night
| is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the
| hope that it will fail.
|
| How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be
| seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially
| in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a
| fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful
| when paired with a programmer.
| cafebabbe wrote:
| AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer.
|
| Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice.
|
| I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.
| duggan wrote:
| Motivated novices will just learn differently, and produce
| different kinds of systems for different audiences with
| different expectations.
|
| Some will dig into obscurities that LLMs don't or can't
| touch, others will orchestrate the tools, Gastown-style,
| into some as-yet-unknown form.
|
| People will vibe themselves into a corner and either start
| learning or flame out.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Endgame is to produce AI which will not need any
| supervision by the time the current generation of
| experienced developers will retire or even sooner. I don't
| know if it will happen but many bet on this and models are
| still improving, flattening is not yet seen.
| ajshahH wrote:
| This implies programming is done and there will be no
| other advancements.
|
| And flattening is being seen, no? Recent advancements are
| mostly from RL'ing, which has limitations (and tradeoffs)
| too. Are there more tricks after that?
| Verdex wrote:
| Yeah, even the AI CEOs are admitting that training
| scaling is over. They claim that we can keep the party
| going with post training scaling, which I personally find
| hard to believe but I'm not really up to speed on those
| techs.
|
| I mean, maybe you can just keep an eye on what people are
| using the tools for and then monkey patch your way to
| sufficiently agi. I'll believe it when we're all begging
| outside the data centers for bread.
|
| [Based on other history of science and technology
| advancements since the stone ages, I would place agi at
| 200-500 years out at least. You have to wait decades
| after a new toy is released for everyone to realize
| everything they knew was wrong and then the academics get
| to work then everyone gets complacent then new accidental
| discovery produces a new toy etc.]
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability
| and growing opportunities.
|
| This is not the case:
|
| - Before the 90s, programming was rather a job for people who
| were insanely passionate about technology, and working as a
| programmer was not that well-regarded (so no "growing
| opportunities").
|
| - After the burst of the first dotcom bubble, a lot of
| programmers were unemployed.
|
| - Every older programmer can tell you how fast the skills
| that they have can become and became irrelevant.
|
| Over the last decade, the stability and opportunities for
| programmers was more like a series of boom-bust cycles.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Correction: "Over the last decade" -> "Over the last decade
| _s_ [plural] ".
| danhau wrote:
| Thanks for chiming in. I appreciate your comments on my
| young views.
|
| What do you make of AI?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What do you make of AI?
|
| Let me put it this way: I do have my opinion on this
| topic, but this whole topic is insanely multi-faceted,
| and some claims that I am rather certain about are more
| at the boundaru of the Overton window of HN, so I won't
| post it here.
|
| But the article which the whole discussion is about
|
| > https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-
| software-sim...
|
| offers in my opinion a rather balanced perspective
| regarding using AI for coding (which does not mean that
| this article is near to my opinion).
|
| I will just give some less controversial thoughts and
| advices concerning AI:
|
| - A huge problem when discussing AI is that the whole
| topic is a hodgepodge of various very diverse topics.
|
| - The (current) AI industry has invested a lot of
| marketing efforts to re-define what AI stood for in the
| past (it basically convinced the mass of people that "AI
| = what we are offering")
|
| - I cannot say whether AI will be capable of replacing
| lots of people in office jobs or not (I have serious
| doubts). Media loves to disseminate this topic, but in my
| opinion it does not really matter: the agenda is rather
| to spread fear among employees to make them more
| obedient.
|
| - Even if AI will be capable of replacing only few office
| workers (a scenario that I rather believe in), it does
| not mean that management will not use "AI"/"replace by
| AI" as a very convenient excuse to get rid of lots of
| employees. The dismissed workers will then mostly vent
| their spleen on the AI companies instead of the
| management; in other work: AI is a very convenient
| scapegoat for inconvenient management decisions. And yes,
| I consider it to be possible that some event that leads
| to mass layoffs might happen in a few years (but this is
| speculative).
|
| - While I cannot say how much quality improvement is
| possible for current AI models (i.e. I don't know whether
| there exists a technological barrier), the signs are
| clear that as of today AI companies have hit some soft
| "cost barriers". I don't know whether these are easily
| solvable or not, but be aware of their existence.
|
| - So, my advice is: if an AI model is of use for some
| project that you have (e.g. generating graphics/content
| for your web platform; using it as a tool for developing
| the next scientific breakthrough; ...), do it _now_. Don
| 't assume that the models will do this nearly freely for
| you anymore in the future (it can be that this will stay
| possible in the possible, but be cautious).
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| For a brief blip in time the last few years it was possible
| to jump from a code camp to a decent paying job and vaguely
| disappear for a while like Milton from office space. The
| current period from a bad economy is more of a reversion to
| the mean.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The thing about talking to computers is less the formality and
| more the specificity. People don't know what they want. To use
| an LLM effectively, you need to think about what you want with
| enough clarity to ask for it and check that you're getting it.
| That LLMs accept your wishes in the form of natural language
| instead of something with a LALR(1) grammar doesn't magically
| obviate the need for specificity and clarity in communication.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Agree that one needs clarity, but how does that differ from
| my example with the manager and the engineer? The manager
| also (ideally) learns in time that, when they are more clear,
| the engineer does the work better.
| skydhash wrote:
| TLDR: Clarity in software engineering means detailing all
| the constraints, which no user (apart from lawyers and
| engineers) usually do, as the real world has constraints
| that software does not.
|
| The hardware offers so little guarantees that the whole OS
| job is to offer that. All layers are formal, but usefulness
| doesn't comes from that. Usefulness comes from a consistent
| models that embodies a domain. So you have the hardware
| that has capabilities but no model. Then you add the OS's
| kernel that will impose a model on the hardware, then you
| have the system libraries that will further restrict it to
| a certain domains. Then you have the general libraries that
| are more useful because they present another perspective.
| And then you have the application that use this last model
| according to a certain need.
|
| A good example is that you go from the sound card to the
| sound subsystem, the the alsa libraries, to pipewire, to an
| audio player or a media framework like the one in the
| browser. This particular tower has dozens of engineers that
| has contributed to it, and most developers only deal with
| the last layers, but the lesson is that the perspective of
| a user differs from the building blocks that we have in
| hand. Software engineering is to reconcile the twos.
|
| So people may know how the things should look or behave on
| their hand, but they have no idea on what the building
| blocks on the other hand. It's all abstract. The only thing
| real is the hardware and the energy powering it. Everything
| else needs to be specified with code. And in that world
| that forms the middle layer, there's a lot of rules to
| follow to make something good, but laws that prevent
| something bad are little. It's not like physical
| engineering where there are things you just cannot do.
|
| Just like on a canvas you can draw anything as long as it's
| inside the boundary of the canvas, you can do anything in
| software as long as it's inside the boundary of the
| hardware. OS in personal computers adds a little more
| restrictions, but it's not a lot. It's basically fantasia
| in there.
| elasticeel wrote:
| Do they though? Our do they learn that having a good
| engineer means they can assign ambiguous tasks and the
| software developer can reason through good decision making
| and follow up with clarifying questions.
|
| LLMs need to get better at asking clarifying questions and
| trying to show the initial solution might not work. Even
| when they get better at that, this article states that
| managers not capable of thinking through the answers well
| enough will fall short and this is the space that
| developers live in.
| medi8r wrote:
| There are a lot of people who can't program but can do
| specifity. Researchers and lawyers for a start. It does widen
| the pool and there might be suprising people who never coded
| who can now build. Maybe people previosuly dismissed as not
| academic or "blue collar".
|
| Paradoxically this may mean there are more jobs for
| programmer and programmer-likes alike as new cottage
| industries are born. AI for dentists is coming.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| A manager is not going to handle all the nitty gritty details,
| that an engineer knows, fine say, they can ask a LLM to make a
| web portal.
|
| Does he know about SQL injection? XSS?
|
| Maybe he knows slightly about security stuffs and asks the LLM
| to make a secure site with all the protection needed. But how
| the manager knows it works at all? If you figure out there's a
| issue with your critical part of the software, after your users
| data are stolen, how bad the fallback is going to be?
|
| How good a tool is also depends on who's using it. Managers are
| not engineers obviously unless he was an engineer before
| becoming a manager, but you are saying engineers are not
| needed. So, where's the engineer manager is going to come from?
| I'm sure we're not growing them in some engineering trees
| skydhash wrote:
| It's like saying "I want a bridge" and then expect steel
| beams and cables to appear (or planks and ropes) and that's
| all you need. The user needs are usually clear enough (they
| need a way to cross that body of water or that chasm), but
| the how is the real catch.
|
| In the real world, the materials are visible so people have a
| partial understanding on how it gets done. But most of the
| software world is invisible and has no material constraints
| other than the hardware (you can't use RAM that is not
| there). If the hardware is like a blank canvas, a standard
| web framework is like a draw by the numbers book (but one
| with lines drawn by a pencil so you can erase it easily).
| Asking the user to code with LLM is like asking a blind to
| draw the Mona Lisa with a brick.
| edgyquant wrote:
| There are already companies that exist to audit the security
| of codebases programmatically so this will just be part of
| the flow
| empath75 wrote:
| I spent the last two weeks at work building a whole system to
| deploy automated claude code agents in response to events and
| even before i finished it was already doing useful work and now
| it is automatically handling jira tickets and making PRs.
| ajshahH wrote:
| > And it can fill in the missing details and disambiguate the
| others.
|
| Are you suggesting "And Claude, make no mistakes" works?
|
| Because otherwise you need an expert operating the thing. Yes,
| it can answer questions, but you need to know what exactly to
| ask.
|
| > This has been known to be possible for decades, as
| (simplifying a bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the
| engineer in natural, ambiguous language what to do and they
| will do it
|
| I have yet to see vibe coding work like this. Even expert devs
| with LLMs get incorrect output. Anytime you have to correct
| your prompt, that's why your argument fails.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| I truly believe that people that see entire, non-trivial
| applications being bult without serious human intervention
| have not in fact worked on non-trivial applications.
|
| And while these tools can be invaluable in some cases, I
| still don't know how we get from "Hazy requirements where the
| user doesn't know what they even want" to "Production-ready
| apps built at the finger-tips of the PM".
|
| Another really important detail people keep missing is that
| we have to make thousands of micro-decisions along the way to
| build up a cohesive experience to the user. LLM's haven't
| really shown they're great at not building assumptions into
| code. In fact, they're really bad at it.
|
| Lastly, do people not realize how easy it to so convince an
| LLM of something that isn't true or vice versa? i love these
| tools but even I find myself trying to steer it into the
| direction that makes sense to me, not the direction that
| makes sense generally.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless
| conversions of formal languages to formal languages.
|
| This is just categorically false.
|
| No-code tools didn't fail because they were "mindless
| conversions of formal languages to formal languages". They
| failed because the people who were supposed to benefit the most
| (non-developers) neither had the time nor desire to build stuff
| in the first place.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to
| the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I
| do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is
| expanding.
|
| Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from
| scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design
| principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert
| guardrails, I believe.
|
| It won't be long before AI employees are going to join daily
| standup and deliver work alongside the team with other users in
| the org not even realizing or caring that it's an AI "staff
| member".
|
| It won't be much longer after that when they will start to tech
| lead those same teams.
| Roark66 wrote:
| After 2 years of using all of these tools (Claude C, Gemini
| cli, opencode with all models available) I can tell you it is a
| huge enabler, but you have to provide these "expert guardrails"
| by monitoring every single deliverable.
|
| For someone who is able to design an end to end system by
| themselves these tools offer a big time saving, but they come
| with dangers too.
|
| Yesterday I had a mid dev in my team proudly present a Web tool
| he "wrote" in python (to be run on local host) that runs
| kubectl in the background and presents things like versions of
| images running in various namespaces etc. It looked very slick,
| I can already imagine the product managers asking for it to be
| put on the network.
|
| So what's the problem? For one, no threading whatsoever, no
| auth, all queries run in a single thread and on and on. A
| maintenance nightmare waiting to happen. That is a risk of a
| person that knows something, but not enough building tools by
| themselves.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Yup. I'm not expert so maybe I'm completely off base, but if
| I were OpenAI or Anthropic I'd likely just hire 1000 highly
| skilled engineers across multiple disciplines, tell them to
| build something in their domain of expertise, then critique
| the model's output, iteratively work on guardrails for a
| month or two until the model one-shots the problem, and
| package that into the new release.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| That's exactly what they are doing via dataannotation.tech
| and other services.
| kopirgan wrote:
| Any comments on how the copyright issues are handled in
| corporate settings? I mean both in terms of staying clear of
| lawsuit+ ensuring what we produce remains safe from copying
| bakugo wrote:
| I've been hearing this for several years. How much longer is
| "it won't be long"?
| bluGill wrote:
| I've heard the same "it won't be long" from UML and 4GL -
| until the industry finally gave up. Both of those are still
| used a lot in industry and they do well in their place, but
| nobody pretends they will ever be everything to everyone
| anymore.
| symfrog wrote:
| The closer you get to releasing software, the less useful LLMs
| become. They tend to go into loops of 'Fixed it!' without
| having fixed anything.
|
| In my opinion, attempting to hold the hand of the LLM via
| prompts in English for the 'last mile' to production ready code
| runs into the fundamental problem of ambiguity of natural
| languages.
|
| From my experience, those developers that believe LLMs are good
| enough for production are either building systems that are not
| critical (e.g. 80% is correct enough), or they do not have the
| experience to be able to detect how LLM generated code would
| fail in production beyond the 'happy path'.
| empath75 wrote:
| This is not my experience with claude code. It does forget
| big picture things but if you scope your changes well it's
| fine.
| symfrog wrote:
| I would estimate that out of every 200 lines of code that
| Claude Code produces, I notice at least 1 issue that would
| cause severe problems in production.
|
| In my opinion these discussions should include MREs
| (minimal reproducible examples) in the form of prompts to
| ground the discussion.
|
| For example, take this prompt and put it into Claude Code,
| can you see the problematic ways it is handling
| transactions?
|
| ---
|
| The invoicing system is being merged into the core system
| that uses Postgres as its database. The core system has a
| table for users with columns user_id, username,
| creation_date . The invoicing data is available in a json
| file with columns user_id, invoice_id, amount, description.
|
| The data is too big to fit in memory.
|
| Your role is to create a Python program that creates a
| table for the invoices in Postgres and then inserts the
| data from the json file. Users will be accessing the system
| while the invoices are being inserted.
|
| ---
| edgyquant wrote:
| What he's saying is split this up into multiple tasks to
| create the table, insert the data etc
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Isn't that the hard part? If the tasks are small enough
| and well defined, where's the win over just writing the
| code right there and then?
| empath75 wrote:
| Well claude can also refine it into smaller tasks and
| that's where you can fix those major problems in
| production issues.
| flagos10 wrote:
| You can use an LLM to generate that list of tasks.
| snackerblues wrote:
| And how does a new grad that's never actually programmed
| know whether that list of tasks makes sense?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| And that's why you ask for a high level plan for
| something like that _before_ you let the agent write any
| code. Then you review the plan for flaws, revise it, and
| prompt the system to fill out more details for each step.
| Repeat as necessary. Yes it 's slow, but it's the best
| way of using this "glorified autocomplete" to ease and
| speed up real work.
| snackerblues wrote:
| People that have never written their own code won't know
| what the flaws are.
| ajshahH wrote:
| Yes, but knowing how to scope your changes requires a lot
| of expertise.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| The amount of "apps" I've had dumped on my team that are
| everything from un-releasable to deployed on some random
| shit-cloud we haven't approved (vercel comes up a lot). If
| you needed hand holding to release things or had to throw
| software over the fence to others to "productionise" etc then
| you probably don't know what you're talking about.
| geraneum wrote:
| > poor adherence to high-level design principles and
| consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I
| believe.
|
| That's a bit... handwavy...!
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I can take a verbal description from a meeting with five to ten
| people and put together something they can interact with in two
| weeks. That is _a lot_ slower than Claude Code! Yet everywhere
| I've worked, this is more than fast enough.
|
| Over two more weeks I can work with those same five to ten
| people (who often disagree or have different goals) and get a
| first draft of a feature or small, targeted product together.
| In those latter two weeks, writing code isn't what takes time;
| working through what people think they mean verses what they
| are actually saying, mediating one group of them to another
| when they disagree (or mostly agree) is the work. And then,
| after that, we introduce a customer. Along the way I learn to
| become something of an expert in whatever the thing is and
| continue to grow the product, handing chunks of responsibility
| to other developers at which point it turns into a real thing.
|
| I work with AI tooling and leverage AI as part of products,
| where it makes sense. There are parts of this cycle where it is
| helpful and time saving, but it certainly can't replace me. It
| can speed up coding in the first version but, today, I end up
| going back and rewriting chunks and, so far, that eats up the
| wins. The middle bit it clearly can't do, and even at the end
| when changes are more directed it tends toward weirdly
| complicated solutions that aren't really practical.
| Havoc wrote:
| History reviews is not a great way to approach ground breaking
| tech
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| We have yet to invent ground breaking tech that transcends
| either human nature or the banal depravity that stems from the
| profit motive at scale. Prior history of major tech innovations
| therefore may have some insight to offer regarding expected
| outcomes of the current hype wave around AI. The notion that
| technology so cleanly breaks from underlying social paradigms
| as to be wholly unpredictable is one of the tech industries
| most persistently naive and destructive mythologies.
| elcapitan wrote:
| "Not learning from history because the present is the present"
| is a pretty accurate description of the world in 2026, at
| least.
| g947o wrote:
| You are not going to stop people from reading into history,
| ever. If anything, people need to learn more about what
| happened in the past.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot
| more about in the late 90's early 00's than now.
|
| You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software
| reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you have been in the industry for a few decades you will be
| able to think of several hundred "silver bullets" that made
| great promises - some even turned out to be great ideas, but
| none where the 10x revolution that they promised.
|
| The article is a good summary of major movements through the
| decades without so much that whole point is lost in the
| details. I would have put in a slightly different set of things
| if I wanted to write that article, but the point would still
| stand and I would leave out many things that could be put in
| but would be too much noise.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's talked about a lot now, too - that's ultimately what is
| meant by such terms as Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM).
| richm44 wrote:
| SBOMs are more an attempt to solve some of the problems
| introduced by software reuse.
| https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/sbom/ has some
| interesting talks about the successes and failures of them.
| jleyank wrote:
| Developers are "unwanted overhead" until the customer money
| threatens to walk out the door. They're going to damage their
| future products and probably reduce their customer base (fewer
| consumers) and then sit there looking like gaffed fish when the
| budget ink turns red. "Who would have thought..."
|
| Don't facilitate losing your job.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Funny part is we've already had this exact thing happen with
| outsourcing. It sure _looked_ like a bargain until you got to
| such pesky details as correctness and maintainability.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I am starting to think it is a part of the management cycle.
| They new batch feels confident they can do X so they have to
| re-learn, while inflicting ridiculous amount of pain the
| process.
|
| Two years ago, one former exec at my place was perfectly
| happy to throw resources ( his word ) from India at a
| problem, while unwilling to pay the vendor for the same
| thing. I voiced my objection once, but after it was dismissed
| I just watched the thing blow up.
|
| I am not saying current situation is the same. It is not.
| But, it is the same hubris, which means miscalculations will
| happen ( like with Dorsey's Block mass firing ).
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| History truly repeats itself. C-suites will forever be the
| source of stupid decisions in our profession.
| bluGill wrote:
| C-suites are the source of all the important decisions,
| both the great ones and the stupid ones. The great people
| in the C-suite have figured out how to get advice from
| people who are below them and not "yes-men" to tell them
| what to decide - but right or wrong the buck stops there.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one:
| mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated...
| and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling
| gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to
| clean up and deal with this shit.
|
| Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is
| probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is
| that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to
| also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-
| grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You still have to ship a product though.
|
| This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we
| had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions
| of lines of code, to the point where shipping _anything_
| sizable in a working state on time without last minute
| scope reductions is nearly unheard of.
|
| I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes
| to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal
| post.
| bluGill wrote:
| Testing to ensure the product works as expected is more
| than half of the product development labor if you want a
| quality product. This includes time spends on things like
| the mandatory "anti-harassment" training any competent HR
| is forcing you to once in a while even though not related
| to product delivery (or so I hope - some should be fired
| for the problems you are causing by not living that
| training)
|
| LLMs can write a lot of code. they can even write a
| comprehensive test suite for that code. However they
| can't tell you if it doesn't work because of some
| interaction with something else you didn't think about.
| They can't tell you that all race conditions are really
| fixed (despite being somewhat good at tracking them down
| when known). They can't tell you that the program doesn't
| work because it doesn't do something critical that nobody
| thought to write into the requirements until you noticed
| it was missing.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| SOS.. i just got it.
| kopirgan wrote:
| Wow it mentions practically every flavour of the month technology
| that was supposed to make it drag and drop to make useful
| programs
|
| I recall Power builder in particular it was the rage.
| manoDev wrote:
| There are two ways to look at it:
|
| - Software engineering is a cost center, they are middlemen
| between the C-level ideas and a finished product.
|
| - Software engineering is about figuring out how to automate a
| problem, exploring the domain, defining context, tradeoffs, and
| unlocking new capabilities in the process
| nz wrote:
| Quasi-relevant excerpt from an odd essay (footnotes and
| references omitted).
|
| ``` My own eyes spent countless nights observing, with
| curiosity and wonder and delight, the responses of a computer,
| as I commanded it with code, like a sorcerer casting spells. I
| could not have known, that this obedient machine, this silicon
| golem, was also, slowly and imperceptibly, enchanting me, and
| changing how my eyes would see.
|
| At the time^21 , I was a mere fifteen years old, young enough,
| so that the gravity of life was weak enough, and the mind
| nimble enough, to allow me to explore without any material
| justification.
|
| The computer was the believed and I was the believer.
|
| A consequence of becoming obsessed^22 with computer
| programming, is that one starts to see new metaphors,
| algorithmic metaphors, everywhere one looks. This new
| metaphorical lense, belongs entirely to the third eye. Without
| this lense, I would look at a traffic jam, and see a traffic
| jam. With the lense, I would look at a traffic jam, and wonder
| if, and to what extent, the latency-throughput trade-off^23 was
| true for highways. Without the lense, I would read about social
| theory, and simply see the words. With the lense, I would ask
| if society was, a tree^24 , a graph^25, a tree of graphs, or a
| graph of trees^26.
|
| To generalize, the computer programmer looks at something, and
| asks, _is this thing an algorithm, and if so, what kind_ ? The
| entire _trade_ of com-puter programming, it revolves around
| this question, around the discovery of metaphors that
| fit^27[13][14].
|
| It is thus little surprise, when a computer programmer asks if
| (or sometimes asserts that) a certain kind of algorithm^28 is
| intelligence^29 , consciousness, or both.
|
| The entire ritual of computer programming, is similar to the
| trade, in that it involves discovering metaphors, not as a
| means to an end, but as their own end. This ritual is difficult
| to explain to someone who has never practiced it. Imagine,
| instead of trying to find metaphors that bridge the real to the
| algorithmic, one tries to find metaphors that bridge the
| algorithmic to itself.
|
| It is very similar to what mathematicians do, but it requires
| writing programs in a very principled and abstract way^30 .
|
| This ritual, unlike the ritual of writing, and unlike the
| ritual of mathemat-ics, has a dominant material component (the
| computer) which can make your code, in addition to an
| _imaginary_ experience, a _material_ experience^31 . This makes
| the computer a medium -- an artificial oracle or artificial
| hallucinogen -- that can safely imagine the unimaginable. And
| like the oracle, the computer exists to provide insight^32.
|
| Without the ritual of programming, there would be no field of
| chaos the-ory, nor complex systems (very important for
| economics and environmental sciences), and _certainly_ no
| elaborate fractals. Pure mathematics could only scratch the
| surface, because the mathematical ideas, of the mid 20th
| century, that our imaginations could access, were insufficient
| for exploring these sys-tems. Computers allow us, not unlike
| microscopes and telescopes, to magnify the informational
| dimension of nature [17].
|
| Computers, and the arcane programming languages that make them
| obey, are magic machines, that created a new interaction
| between, two elements of the human psychic triad, the
| immaterial and material.
|
| What is this triad, and what is its third element? The concept
| of the triad appears so frequently, in recorded human thought,
| and in the structure of language, that it is either some kind
| of adaptive ideal^33 , or a consequence of language itself^34,
| if not both. Pythagoras called _three_ perfection itself. Plato
| divided the world into three parts. And, even today, our modern
| shamans and sages, use triads to discuss the universe.
|
| Roger Penrose has a traid consisting of physical, platonic, and
| mind. Lacan has a triad consisting of real, symbolic, and
| imaginary. Plato has a triad of good, truth, and beauty. Of the
| three, Lacan's naming is the most self-explanatory.
|
| In this essay, the _material_ is the real, and the _immaterial_
| is the other two.
|
| The _trade_ of programming is driven by the _real_, while the
| _ritual_ of pro-gramming is driven by the _imaginary_. A trade
| is pursued because of real, material concerns (such as covering
| the cost of living), while a ritual is pur-sued because of
| imaginary concerns -- concerns that can, more precisely, be
| called _aesthetic_. ```
| ahsteele wrote:
| Did you write this? Do you have a link to the entire essay? I
| enjoyed the excerpt.
| nz wrote:
| Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the
| _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here
| (https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/),
| with a link to the PDF at the bottom.
|
| [1]: what you see is the first 5% of the essay, based on
| the notes that never made it in. Many topics are untouched,
| such as cults, caves, imagination, conspiracy, paranoia,
| fear, wakefulness, blindness, hallucinations, altering
| consciousness, notations, etc. And other topics are
| mentioned but not explored deeply (taoism, buddhism,
| prophecy, trust+belief[2], mnemonics, dreams, metaphors,
| etc). So it's mostly setup, with planned payoffs and
| epiphanies in the latter unwritten parts[3]. And some of
| the transitions between topics are in need of deburring.
|
| [2]: note that many languages use the same word for trust
| and belief. In Indo-European languages, the root is the
| same root as tree and true. Relevant to the unwritten parts
| of the essay.
|
| [3]: so you'll just have to imagine the unwritten parts,
| until I actually get around to writing them ;)
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| very interesting. esp. The "imagine the unwritten parts"
| :) For a long-time not seen anything letting me such
| freedom
|
| May i suggest two/3 more/other directions to glance at?
|
| - Strugatsky brothers - in "Snail on the slope" [1],
| chapter 3, (about page 11 in original) Peretz talks about
| _understanding_... "Proshche poverit', chem poniat'.
| Proshche razocharovat'sia, chem poniat'. Proshche
| pliunut', chem poniat'. " -- in my flaky translation,
| "it's simpler to believe than to understand. it's simpler
| to get disappointed than to understand. it's simpler to
| spit than to understand". Have a look
|
| - Pirsig's MoQ metaphysics of quality
|
| - the mean-ings of word "mean"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_on_the_Slope
| simonw wrote:
| I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982,
| "Application development without programmers":
| https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart
|
| Which includes this excellent line:
|
| > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible.
| The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point
| at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of
| programmers available _per computer_ is shrinking so fast that
| most computers in the future will have to work at least in part
| without programmers.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| They do. Servers, smartphones, most embedded systems, don't
| need an "operator" as in the past. Your source was probably
| thinking of that kind of "programmer".
| wincy wrote:
| In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher
| at community college night school was at a party and a man who
| he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now
| too!
|
| This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn't super
| technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details
| not exactly right but the man said something like "I use lotus
| notes every day!"
|
| The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.
| voxl wrote:
| What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the
| Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now
| we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate
| python"
|
| Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling.
| Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing
| research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on
| a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs
| taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require
| the level of skill to be employable to spike.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that
| then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.
| tralarpa wrote:
| VisiCalc was published in 1979.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet
| formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they
| were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find
| the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles
| about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions
| or more.
|
| I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us
| know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the
| rest don't.
|
| Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will
| people realize they are programming and discipline up?
| simonw wrote:
| I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on
| Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without
| automated tests and with version control based on
| final_final_v2 suffixes.
|
| Somehow civilization continues to function!
|
| Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop
| will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things
| work already.
| ryanmcl wrote:
| There's a third category emerging that I think gets
| overlooked in these discussions = people who couldn't program
| at all before, who now can. Not replacing programmers, but
| creating new ones.
|
| I started coding 8 months ago at 45 with zero experience. I
| now have a production app processing real payments. That was
| genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI
| assistance. Not because I lacked the ability to think through
| problems, but because the skill floor was too high to clear
| while also being a parent with no spare years to invest.
|
| The spreadsheet analogy is apt. Most of those amateur
| spreadsheets aren't replacing finance teams; they're solving
| small problems that would otherwise go unsolved. That's
| closer to what's happening with AI-assisted development, I
| feel, than the "eliminate programmers" framing suggests.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Thoroughly insightful take!
| simonw wrote:
| Congratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole
| thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into
| programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a
| means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they
| are paying you to make a website shat serves as a
| storefront, to make a video game, something for
| accounting,...
|
| It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an
| effective way of doing it, but there may be other options.
| For a storefront, there are website builders that let you
| do it very effectively if your needs match one of their
| templates, there are game engines that require no code, and
| a lot of accounting can be done in Excel.
|
| What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done
| without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable
| option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In
| fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest
| sense of writing something in a programming language, since
| you are using natural language and code is just an
| intermediate step that you can see.
|
| The reason programmers use programming languages is not
| gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate
| programmers" think. It is that programming languages are
| very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous,
| concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages
| or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and
| therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced
| tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a
| certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it
| is worth it.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Good lord, thank you. I'm a huge fan of LLMs, they've
| replaced enormous amounts of toil for me but they are not
| 'my job'.
|
| If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now
| a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon
| and a butcher ...they both cut things?
|
| Most shops never really needed development expertise in-
| house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally
| suitable as code for getting machines to do most business
| things.
|
| In some ways this is worse because while it's
| functionally the same black box intermediary as the
| alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control
| and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling
| or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for
| a well-solved problem?
| guitarbill wrote:
| One counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you
| didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were
| affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe
| isn't the best argument.
| simonw wrote:
| Sure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root
| cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets.
|
| It was an institutional failure, and the software involved
| had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was
| built by supposed professionals.
| guitarbill wrote:
| Sure, we can ignore that specific example, and that
| software has an effect on the world, and that people have
| been trained to expect software to be deterministic and
| accurate.
|
| Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology,
| like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted
| or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and
| "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess
| they should've known better.
|
| I'm personally not comfortable hyping up the benefits
| whilst ignoring the risks, especially for lay people.
| krisoft wrote:
| > we can ignore that specific example
|
| We are not ignoring it. It is just not an example of a
| load bearing excel sheet.
| richm44 wrote:
| Try this https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-
| error-or-how...
| SteveNuts wrote:
| > Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop
| will sink the economy.
|
| The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company
| internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to
| that organization.
|
| Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and
| their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to
| suck up any data someone uploads.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > non-programmers began programming without knowing they were
|
| Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as
| programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like
| that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't.
|
| > spreadsheet formulae
|
| formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.
|
| > I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among
| us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases,
| the rest don't.
|
| Programming isn't really about edge cases or errors.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Excel was the biggest example of a "4GL" that actually
| succeeded. They mentioned Access but Excel was by far more
| widely used. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their
| own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT
| department to do. Other spreadsheets too, at first, but Excel
| ended up dominating.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| > formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.
|
| Define "here", please! Perhaps your "here" and mine differ,
| but the view from my here is that while all three plurals are
| generally acceptable, formulae is the correcter double plus
| good spelling for this context.
| nurettin wrote:
| > began programming without knowing they were
|
| Worse, they were doing functional programming just by chaining
| formulas without side effects, surpassing the skills of most
| self-proclaimed programmers out there.
| analog31 wrote:
| I have a feeling that the cost of bad / inefficient / late
| software runs into at least the billions. The biggest risks are
| unavoidably attached to the most costly software projects, that
| are probably the most likely to be conducted in the most
| sophisticated and professional fashion with the latest silver
| bullet methodologies.
|
| _The Mythical Man Month_ is just over half a century old, yet
| still reads like it was written yesterday.
| shiandow wrote:
| LLMs seem quite successful when considered something like a
| natural langiage interface, but expecting intelligence seems a
| step too far. For one they do not learn, at least not online, and
| that is a somewhat important requirement for truly intelligent
| behaviour.
|
| Arguably programming is as much learning as it is writing code.
| This is part of the reason some people copy an entire API and
| don't realise they're not so much building useful code as
| building an understanding.
| nz wrote:
| In some sense, programming is about figuring out which
| algorithms are a fitting metaphor for business problems. By
| programming, you are building a model of the business problem
| and a model of its solution. Most of the non-programmers who
| are in positions of authority (managers, CEOs, even some CTOs),
| do not understand that this is what programmers do. From their
| point of view, the authorities come up with a "strategy", after
| dozens of meetings, and give the programmers vague instructions
| based on the strategy, and programmers turn those instructions
| into code that does something somewhere, usually after finding
| ways to avoid bad or unfeasible ideas, while still complying
| with the instructions.
|
| To them, an LLM is indistinguishable from a programmer. From
| the point of view of authority, progress happens one meeting at
| a time. The reality is that there is a pyramid of experts
| beneath the authorities, that keep everything running smoothly,
| in spite of the best attempts of the authorities to demolish
| the foundation of the pyramid by "helping".
|
| EDIT: to end on a positive note, it does not have to be this
| way. We just have to be willing to understand _how_ the
| organization we are a part of actually functions. And that
| means actually being curious instead of merely authoritative. I
| understand that curiosity is hard to maintain when you swim
| with sharks, so maybe don't swim with sharks.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I remember being in my early 20s, learning C and Pascal, and
| having this one kid telling me I was learning dead languages and
| he'd earn 3 times more than me leaning 4GL as well as himself
| being 3 times smarter than everyone else too.
|
| The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because
| he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I
| pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C
| and this wasn't going to change any time soon.
|
| Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the
| world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.
| pixelsort wrote:
| > There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep
| understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what
| tools emerge.
|
| I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort
| when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and
| individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I
| find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining
| deep knowledge will continue to evaporate; necessitating AI-
| assistance.
|
| The reason is it different this time around is because the
| capabilities of LLMs have incentivized the professional class to
| betray the institutions that enabled their specializations. I am
| talking about the amazing minds at Adobe, Figma, and the FAANGS
| who are bridging agentic reasoners and diffusion models with
| domain-specific needs of their respective professional users.
|
| Humans are class of beings, and the humans accelerating the
| advance of AI in creative tools are the reason that things are
| different this time. We have class traitors among us this time,
| and they're "just doing their jobs". For most, willful disbelief
| isn't even a factor. They think they're helping while each PR
| just brings them closer to unemployment.
| nz wrote:
| Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living
| areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within
| two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a
| few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the
| shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their
| customers and their species.
|
| The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their
| time in the long run. Don't let greed and fear slide. Don't
| hate someone for choosing their family and comfort over your
| own, hate the system that forces them to make that choice. Hold
| them accountable, but attack the system, instead of its
| hostages and victims.
| pixelsort wrote:
| The level of compliance and enthusiasm varies. Some believe
| they are making the world a better place. Some feel they're
| adding value but suspect they are trapped within a cycle they
| refuse to examine. Some are more connected to the truth, and
| comply willingly but resentfully.
|
| Where you fall depends on where you work and what you work
| on.
|
| You make a great points about the chain of accountability.
| But, in my opinion, working professionals are the only agents
| in the system with the potential to realize their own
| culpability and divert their actions.
|
| Perhaps, it isn't fair to point to them and call them
| traitors. Still, they are the only ones with enough agency to
| potentially organize and collectively push for the kind of
| ethics that could save us all.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Bridging software with domain-specific needs of its
| professional users is nothing new: that _is_ how domain-
| specific professional software gets built. What is new is that
| the people doing this are being referred to hysterically as
| "class traitors", when the improvements they're working on will
| bring massive and widely available benefits to professionals
| the world over.
| pixelsort wrote:
| While the desire is not new, advancements in LLMs and
| diffusion models have made this sort of bridging effective
| and attractive to an unprecedented degree.
|
| Those massively and widely available benefits will continue
| to deflate the value of human intelligence until even most of
| innovators currently working on them lose their seats at the
| table too.
| manithree wrote:
| I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS
| students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM
| employee that we would regret having majored in computer science
| because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged
| like milk.
|
| Will something come along some day that will actually drastically
| reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers?
| Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously
| doubt it.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| LOL... I was in the same position. I graduated from high school
| in 88 and got my first job a couple of years later, working at
| a small insurance company running IBM AS/400. I had just gotten
| my job as an operator with a dream of becoming a programmer,
| and here comes IBM with its CASE tool. I truly thought the
| world was going to end.
|
| A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic,
| and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be
| writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in
| FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder.
|
| All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies
| promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises."
| Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes.
| Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs
| going away? No.
| bluGill wrote:
| A good LLM is a great tool for those who know what they are
| doing. They can follow some very tedious code paths (if thread
| 1 is doing this, while thread 4 while thread 2...). However
| they also can write some really really bad code. They sometimes
| propose bad solutions/architecture. You need someone knowledge
| to guide them and keep them on a good path.
|
| Back in the 80's there were ads for tools to "dinosaurs" who
| everyone looked to when their 4GL language failed to solve the
| problem.
| antonvs wrote:
| I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of
| course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos
| of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor
| stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool.
| Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the
| code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't
| need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so
| on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the
| curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay
| any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Was a "to do" list the example they used at that time also?
| getnormality wrote:
| I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will
| get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We
| are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like
| looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are
| still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet
| human needs.
|
| To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated
| and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a
| death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on
| reality.
| debo_ wrote:
| I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do
| a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare
| enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully
| automating" it.
|
| I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom
| engineering" in my entire life.
| mjevans wrote:
| Are they a rare artisan rather than a commodity? Maybe a
| subtype or cross-trained variation of some other wider job
| role?
| rented_mule wrote:
| Randomly, I spent an afternoon with a team of loom engineers
| long ago. In 1989, I took a month-long trip to the USSR.
| Trips for Americans back then were guided / chaperoned by the
| Soviet government, with the clear intention of showing off
| what the Soviet system was capable of. To see their
| manufacturing prowess, we spent an entire afternoon touring
| an automated bed-sheet factory and talking with the team that
| designed and maintained the machines. I don't remember much
| other than the intense noise and the large number of machines
| with white cotton sheets coming out.
|
| All the sheets we saw in that factory, and in our hotels,
| were noticeably thicker and stiffer than American sheets,
| somewhere between American sheets and denim. When we asked
| about that, they seemed to feel sorry that we only had thin,
| flimsy sheets.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things,
| like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things
| are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to
| meet human needs._
|
| The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to
| automate is _intelligence_. The goal is a machine that 's as
| smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields
| of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an
| hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely
| copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives.
|
| The next goal after that will be to give that machine _hands_ ,
| so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human
| can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to
| produce and cheaper to automate than humans.
|
| You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where
| all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and
| cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would
| control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would
| ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for
| anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions.
|
| But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the
| future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach.
| That's the dream.
| getnormality wrote:
| This author is pointing out that the fraction of the tech
| dream du jour that is actually realized is consistently about
| 1%, so taking tech dreams du jour seriously is guaranteed to
| give you a false world model. Which is unhelpful and
| maladaptive, unless perhaps your goal is to make money off of
| other people with that false world model.
|
| I believe that full automation of the mundanities of human
| life is coming in the fullness of time. But for that insight
| to be helpful to me, I have to get the timing right, and the
| data suggests I should be extremely skeptical about excitable
| tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.
| benj111 wrote:
| Talking heads reference?
|
| Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak
| stuff/employment/the current system.
|
| We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee
| shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is
| can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral
| requirement.
|
| I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the
| average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a
| slum, they were worse off. It took time for the conditions of
| the working class to improve.
|
| Basic income is touted as the solution, but then
| globalisation means workers are moving much more and I'm not
| sure the 2 are compatible. Not that I have a better idea.
|
| I do think we need a cultural change decoupling work from
| self worth. It's becoming less and less defensible to require
| everyone to work to be 'deserving'.
|
| All that being said, there will still be jobs, there will
| always be demand for hand made, or something that isn't
| soulless corporatism. Although I'm starting to sound like
| Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of
| the future, which may not achievable
|
| Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed
| as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal
| changes you are talking about only came after humanity
| almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which
| coincidentally happened to start in 2026)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer
| moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were
| worse off.
|
| They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad
| rural poverty was at that time.
| debo_ wrote:
| I like the arrogance present in the title. "Eternal promise" in a
| discipline that was conceived about a century ago.
| antonvs wrote:
| This topic always reminds me of "The Last One",
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) :
|
| > "The name derived from the idea that The Last One was the last
| program that would ever need writing, as it could be used to
| generate all subsequent software."
|
| That was released in 1981. Spoiler alert: it was not, in fact,
| the last one.
| bluGill wrote:
| Something else that really should be mentioned:
|
| Every recession where there was mass lay-offs on programmers (not
| every recession hits programmers hard), there were many articles
| saying that whatever that latest thing [see article] was the
| cause of this and industry is getting rid of programmers they
| will never need again.
|
| In every case of course "it is the economy stupid". The tools
| made little difference in the need for programmers. The tools
| that worked actually increased the need because things you
| wouldn't even attempt without the tools were now worth hiring
| extra people to do.
| miljanm wrote:
| what's wrong with eliminating programmers?
| sfblah wrote:
| I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to
| try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core
| of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can
| emulate.
|
| But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who
| attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and
| basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and
| React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.
|
| So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in
| the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will
| probably need to move on to other jobs.
| designerarvid wrote:
| During the 90's economic crisis all drafters drawing building
| blueprints by hand disappeared from the Swedish construction
| industry. Engineers started using CAD instead
|
| Just one example of how this has happened again and again.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move
| anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the
| smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual
| business requirements that worth a lick.
| getnormality wrote:
| So are you saying that bad programmers play a dual role of
| attending meetings to get business requirements, in a way
| that AI cannot do?
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I am saying, having seen stuff implemented that simply does
| not make sense to anyone with an understanding of the
| actual situation on the ground, yes. And the funny thing
| is, it is not even an llm issue. This is a very, very human
| issue.
| getnormality wrote:
| So is the actual work of programming is mostly just
| sitting in meetings where business people and programmers
| slowly muddle through requirements?
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| The actual work happens in the head. I suspect you know
| this. Now, there is a clear benefit to being able to
| flatten some of the issues related to coding, but do you
| _really_ think, any of it can be done without those
| meetings and muddling through those requirements? At the
| very least, there needs to be one person that understands
| what is actually needed.
|
| I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense,
| I half expect it. I will be very subtle, I don't believe
| the issue lies with the tooling ( AI or not ).
| getnormality wrote:
| I spend an unusually small proportion of my life in
| meetings, probably an idiosyncratic feature of my job.
|
| My impression is that the main reason most people have so
| many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If
| you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to
| work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking
| at everyone else with the expectation that they are
| working. But if you are not in a meeting, this
| expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at
| work and you don't need to work.
|
| In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And
| if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.
|
| Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast
| majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless
| they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means
| someone could be watching you outside meetings, which
| causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises
| productivity.
| BobBagwill wrote:
| The potentially cool thing about LLM's is bootstrapping. No
| matter how much COBOL you wrote, COBOL didn't get better. LLM's
| can be used to make LLM's (and other software stuff) better.
| LLM's could be used to create their successor(s).
|
| Of course, in the end, it won't do us humans any good, because
| when the Singularity AKA Rapture comes, we'll all be converted to
| Computronium. :-)
| bdcravens wrote:
| The market however has done a pretty good job of it, especially
| when it's a developer bull market that suddenly shifts
| directions. Case in point: late 90s, the mad rush to put warm
| bodies in chairs for those who could even spell HTML. A few years
| later, many had left and gone back to selling cars or whatever
| they did before.
| BobBagwill wrote:
| If most programming is <em>ShitWork ®</em> and most
| programmers are performing ShitWork and LLM's are good at
| ShitWork, then most programmers are out of a job. If those
| programmers can pivot to another non-ShitWork or programming-
| adjacent function, they can remain employed.
|
| There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides
| coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].
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