[HN Gopher] Coding after coders: The end of computer programming...
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Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
Author : angst
Score : 200 points
Date : 2026-03-12 10:29 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-progra...
| jazz9k wrote:
| Because they are still making the same salary. In 5 years, when
| their job is eliminated, and they can't find work, they will
| regret their decision.
| chrisra wrote:
| Their decision to... use AI for coding?
| lelanthran wrote:
| Well, their position on AI.
|
| By their own accounts they are just pressing enter.
| siva7 wrote:
| we had no choice. if i don't do it someone else will..
| ripe wrote:
| > it could also be that these software jobs won't pay as well as
| in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren't as hard as they
| used to be. Acquiring the skills isn't as challenging.
|
| This sounds opposite to what the article said earlier: newbies
| aren't able to get as much use out of these coding agents as the
| more experienced programmers do.
| kittikitti wrote:
| This article is ragebaiting people and it's an embarrassing
| piece from the NYT.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| NYT has it out for digital advertisers, who directly compete
| with them. I do sense some schadenfreude here that the tech
| nerds who work at these places might be in trouble.
|
| "Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing
| American workers in dying industries that they needed to
| "learn to code."
|
| To copywriters at the NYT, LLMs are far better at stringing
| together natural language prose than large amounts of valid
| software. Get ready to supervise LLMs all day if you're not
| already.
| logicchains wrote:
| LLMs are much better at coding now than at writing prose
| that doesn't sound like slop.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| The code is also recognizable as slop to those who know
| how. Not the tropey "Not X, but Y" kind that's super easy
| to spot. But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc.
|
| A counterpoint is that (maybe) nobody cares if the code
| is understandable, clean and maintainable. But NYT is
| explicitly in the business of selling ads surrounded by
| cheap copy just good enough to attract eyeballs. I
| suspect getting LLMs to write that is going to be far
| easier than getting LLMs to maintain large code bases
| autonomously.
| logicchains wrote:
| >But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc.
|
| If you explicitly make it go over the code file by file
| to clean up, fix duplication and refactor, it'll look
| much better, while no amount of "fix this slop" prompting
| can fix AI prose.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| > no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose
|
| What's the proof for that? What fundamental limitation of
| these large language models makes them unable to produce
| natural language? A lot of people see the high likelihood
| of ever increasing amounts of generated, no-effort
| content on the web as a real threat. You're saying that's
| impossible.
| logicchains wrote:
| >What fundamental limitation of these large language
| models makes them unable to produce natural language?
|
| LLMs can get indefinitely good at coding problems by
| training in a reinforcement learning loop on randomly
| generated coding problems with compiler/unit tests to
| verify correctness. On the other hand, there's no way to
| automatically generate a "human thinks this looks like
| slop" signal; it fundamentally requires human time,
| severely limiting throughput compared to fully
| automatable training signals.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Because we love tech? I'm absolutely terrified about the future
| of employment in this field, but I wouldn't give up this insane
| leap of science fiction technology for anything.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I love tech - tech that actually works well. The current tech
| we have for AI does not, so I'm not excited about it.
| kittikitti wrote:
| "One such test for Python code, called a pytest"
|
| The brain rot from the author couldn't even think of "unit
| test".
| mkehrt wrote:
| Why would you expect a reporter to magically know what a
| "unit test" is? Sounds like a simple miscommunication with
| one of his sources. Not perfect but not "brain rot".
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of
| science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there
| with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do
| anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an
| infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y",
| over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one
| is.
|
| Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust
| it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of
| science fiction"?
|
| Yes, literally. The ship computer voice interface in Star
| Trek was complete science fiction until 2022. Now its ability
| to understand speech and respond seem quaint in comparison to
| current AI.
| deflator wrote:
| What is a coder? Someone who is handed the full specs and sits
| down and just types code? I have never met such a person. The
| most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE has inane
| ideas about what we do.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > The most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE
| has inane ideas about what we do.
|
| I've tended to hold the same opinion of what the average SWE
| thinks everyone else does.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Never worked on offshoring projects? That is exactly what the
| sweatshop coders do.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I think that the current AI tooling is a much bigger threat
| to offshore sweatshops than to domestic programmers.
|
| Why deal with language barriers, time shifts, etc. when a
| small team of good developers can be so much more productive,
| allegedly?
| pjmlp wrote:
| It certainly is,
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipr
| o...
| Tade0 wrote:
| No we don't.
|
| For one, I never saw a "full spec" (if such a thing even
| exists) back in my days of making 8k. Annually.
| neonate wrote:
| Other gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-
| coding-progra...
| zjp wrote:
| There is no such thing as "after coders":
| https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems
|
| This excerpt:
|
| >A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially
| cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does
| the bulk of it.
|
| is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things
| exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large,
| established codebases, and it's basically free riding on the
| years of human work that went into those codebases. I prodded
| Claude to add SNFG depictions to the molecular modeling program I
| work on. It couldn't have come up with the whole program on its
| own and if I tried it would produce a different, maybe worse
| architecture than our atomic library, and then its design choices
| for molecules might constrain its ability to solve the problem as
| elegantly as it did. Even then, it needed a coworker to tell me
| that it had used the incorrect data structure and needed to
| switch to something that could, when selected, stand in for the
| atoms it represented.
|
| Also this:
|
| >But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it's
| worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to
| compose.
|
| Isn't really true. It's the free-riding problem again. The thing
| about an ESP is that the LLM has the advantage of either a blank
| canvas (if you're using one to vibe code a startup), or at least
| the fact that several possibilities converge on one output, but,
| genuinely, not all of those realities include good coding
| architecture. Models can make mistakes, and without a human in
| the loop those mistakes can render a codebase unmaintainable.
| It's a balance. That's why I don't let Claude stamp himself to my
| commits even if he assisted or even did all the work. Who cares
| if Claude wrote it? I'm the one taking responsibility for it. The
| article presents Greenfield as good for a startup, and it might
| be, but only for the early, fast, funding rounds, when you have
| to get an MVP out right now. That's an unstable foundation they
| will have to go back and fix for regulatory or maintenance
| reasons, and I think that's the better understanding of the
| situation than framing Aayush's experience as a user error.
|
| Even so, "weirdly jazzed about their new powers" is an
| understatement. Every team including ours has decades of
| programmer-years of tasks in the backlog, what's not to love
| about something you can set to pet peeves for free and then see
| if the reality matches the ideal? git reset --hard if you don't
| like what it does, and if you do all the better. The Cuisy thing
| with the script for the printer is a perfect application of LLMs,
| a one-off that doesn't have to be maintained.
|
| Also, the whole framing is weirdly self limiting. The
| architectural taste that LLMs are, again, free riding off of, is
| hard won by doing the work more senior engineers are giving to
| LLMs instead of juniors. We're setting ourselves up for a serious
| coordinated action problem as a profession. The article gestures
| at this a couple times
|
| The thing about threatening LLMs is pretty funny too but
| something in me wants to fall back to Kant's position that what
| you do to anything you do to yourself.
| movpasd wrote:
| Regarding LLM's performances on brownfield projects, I thought
| of Naur's "Programming as Theory Building". He explains an
| example of a compiler project that is taken over by a team
| without guidance from the original developers:
|
| > "at [the] later stage the original powerful structure was
| still visible, but made entirely ineffective by amorphous
| additions of many different kinds"
|
| Maybe a way of phrasing it is that accumulating a lot of "code
| quality capital" gives you a lot more leverage over technical
| debt, but eventually it does catch up.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| I spent ~6hrs with Claude trying to fix a web worker bug in a
| small JS code base Claude made. In the end it failed and I ran
| out of credits. Claude kept wanting to rip out huge blocks of
| code and replace entire functions. We never got any closer to a
| solution. The Claude hype is unreal. My 'on the ground'
| experience has been vastly different.
| kuboble wrote:
| Yes, you can get a project with claude to a state of
| unrecoverable garbage. But with a little experience you can
| learn what it's good at and this happens less and less.
| zjp wrote:
| That isn't my experience. My code and bug tracker are public,
| so I have the privilege of being able to paste URLs to
| tickets into Claude Code with the prompt "what the fuck?" and
| it usually comes up with something workable on its own.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Another trash article from the New York Times, who financially
| benefit from this type of content because of their ongoing
| litigation against OpenAI. I think the assumption that developers
| don't code is wrong. Most software engineers don't even want to
| code, they are opportunists looking to make money. I have yet to
| experience this cliff of coding. These people aren't asking for
| hard enough questions. I have a bunch of things I want AI to
| build that it completely fails on.
|
| The article could have been written from a very different
| perspective. Instead, the "journalists" likely interviewed a few
| insiders from Big Tech and generalized. They don't get it. They
| never will.
|
| Before the advent of ChatGPT, maybe 2 in 100 people could code. I
| was actually hoping AI would increase programming literacy but it
| didn't, it became even more rare. Many journalists could have
| come at it from this perspective, but instead painted doom and
| gloom for coders and computer programming.
|
| The New York Times should look in the mirror. With the advent of
| the iPad, most experts agreed that they would go out of business
| because a majority of their revenue came from print media. Look
| what happened.
|
| Understand this, most professional software and IT engineers hate
| coding. It was a flex to say you no longer code professionally
| before ChatGPT. It's still a flex now. But it's corrupt
| journalism when there is a clear conflict of interest because the
| NYT is suing the hell out of AI companies.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Agreed - just like the Fortune article talking about (Edit:
| Morgan Stanley, not GS) saying "the AI revolution is coming
| next year, and will decimate tons of industries, and no one is
| ready for it". They quote Altman and Musk. Gee - what did you
| expect from those two snake-oil salesmen?
| novemberYankee7 wrote:
| Also the fact that NYT gives all their devs licenses to Cursor
| and Claude
| htx80nerd wrote:
| You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly.
| Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I
| love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are
| real.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k
| hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much
| faster that it is hard to justify _ever_ doing large classes of
| things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic
| sensibilities, it simply is what it is).
| lumost wrote:
| Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the
| code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and
| specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or
| will not conform to.
| localhost wrote:
| then have ai write a deterministic transformation tool that
| turns it into the specific style and standard that is
| needed
| igor47 wrote:
| Yeah, I also highly value consistency in my projects, which
| forces me to keep an eye on the LLM and steer it often.
| This limits my overall velocity especially on larger
| features. But I'm still _much_ faster with the agent.
| Recent example, https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 --
| this took me a couple of hours pairing with Claude code,
| which is insane give the size of the work here. Though this
| PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not
| just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model
| a complicated domain, integrating with existing code,
| thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs
| at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm
| just steering
| leptons wrote:
| I've never seen a human estimate their "programming career"
| in kilohours. Is that supposed to look more impressive than
| years? So, you've been programming only about 7 years? I
| guess I'm at about "170 kilohours".
| kennywinker wrote:
| I think it's probabky because of the malcom gladwell "ten
| thousand hours" idea.
| ralferoo wrote:
| As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is
| considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a
| far more honest metric about how much time you've spent
| actually programming.
|
| Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and
| debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing
| something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who
| would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year
| of experience or the second guy with 7 years?
|
| I personally would only measure my experience in years,
| because it's approaching 3 decades full-time in industry
| (plus an additional decade of cutting my teeth during
| school and university), but I can certainly see that
| earlier on in a career it's a useful metric in comparison
| to the 10,000 hours.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| > Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and
| debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing
| something else and only writing code for an hour a day.
| Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with
| one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?
|
| So your logic is that the grandparent specified hours
| because they spent that many hours specifically
| programming, and not by just multiplying the number of
| years by the number of hours in a year?
| ralferoo wrote:
| I don't know exactly how they arrived at their 20k hours
| figure, all I'm saying is that it didn't seem a
| controversial way of expressing their experience level,
| and assumed it was intended to be a comparison to the
| typical 10k hours needed for mastery of a craft.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Not in my experience. But then again, lots of programmers are
| limited in how they use AI to write code. Those limitations are
| definitely real.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| Not what I've experienced
| sp00chy wrote:
| Exactly that is also my experience also with Claude Code. It
| can create a lot of stuff impressively but with LOTS of more
| code than necessary. It's not really effective in the end. I
| have more than 35 years of coding experience and always dig
| into the newest stuff. Quality wise it's still not more than
| junior dev stuff even with latest models, sorry. And I know how
| to talk to these machines.
| TuxSH wrote:
| I don't have as many years of professional experience as you
| do, but IMO code pissing is one of the areas LLMs and
| "agentic tools" shine the _least_.
|
| In both personal projects and $dayjob tasks, the highest
| time-saving AI tasks were:
|
| - "review this feature branch" (containing hand-written
| commits)
|
| - "trace how this repo and repo located at ~/foobar use
| {stuff} and how they interact with each other, make a Mermaid
| diagram"
|
| - "reverse engineer the attached 50MiB+ unstripped ELF
| program, trace all calls to filesystem functions; make a
| table with filepath, caller function, overview of what caller
| does" (the table is then copy-pasted to Confluence)
|
| - basic YAML CRUD
|
| Also while Anthropic has more market share in B2B, their
| model seems optimized for frontend, design, and literary work
| rather than rigorous work; I find it to be the opposite with
| their main competitor.
|
| Claude writes code rife with safety issues/vulns all the
| time, or at least more than other models.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Try the new /simplify command.
| wek wrote:
| This is not my experience either. If you put the work in
| upfront to plan the feature, write the test cases, and then
| loop until they pass... you can build a lot of high quality
| software quickly. The difference between a junior engineer
| using it and a great architect using it is significant. I think
| of it as an amplifier.
| Mars008 wrote:
| > The difference between a junior engineer using it and a
| great architect using it is significant
|
| Yes, juniors are trying to use AI with the minimum input.
| This alone tells a lot..
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This honestly reads to me like "if you spend a lot of time
| doing tedious monotonous shit you can save a lot of time on
| the interesting stuff"
|
| I have no interest being a "great architect" if architects
| don't actually _build anything_
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six
| sharpening my axe" - Abraham Lincoln
| andrekandre wrote:
| > If you put the work in upfront to plan the feature, write
| the test cases, and then loop until they pass...
|
| it can be exhausting and time consuming front-loading things
| so deeply though; sometimes i feel like i would have been
| faster cutting all that out and doing it myself because in
| the doing you discover a lot of missing context (in the spec)
| anyways...
| grey-area wrote:
| I'm amazed at how many great architects and experts on AI we
| now have.
| moezd wrote:
| AI assisted code can't even stick to the API documentation,
| especially if the data structures are not consistent and have
| evolved over time. You would see Claude literally pulling
| function after function from thin air, desperately trying to
| fulfill your complicated business logic and even when it's
| complete, it doesn't look neat at all. Yes, it will have test
| coverage, but one more feature request will probably break the
| back of the camel. And if you raise that PR to the rest of your
| team, good luck trying to summarise it all to your colleagues.
|
| However if you just have an easy project, or a greenfield
| project, or don't care about who's going to maintain that stuff
| in 6 months, sure, go all in with AI.
| ccosky wrote:
| I definitely wonder if the people going all-in on AI
| harnessing are working on greenfield projects, because it
| seems overwhelming to try to get that set up on a brownfield
| codebase where the patterns aren't consistent and the code
| quality is mixed.
| tayo42 wrote:
| So just iterate on it? Your complaint is that the model isn't
| one shotting the problem and reading your mind about style.
| It's like any coding workflow, make it work, then make it
| nice.
| moezd wrote:
| No, I never expect AI to one-shot (if I see such a miracle,
| it's usually because I needed a one-liner or something
| really simple and well documented, which I can also write
| on the whiteboard from memory).
|
| Try iterating over well known APIs where the response
| payloads are already gigantic JSONs, there are multiple
| ways to get certain data and they are all inconsistent and
| Claude spits out function after function, laying waste to
| your codebase. I found no amount of style guideline
| documents to resolve this issue.
|
| I'd rather read the documentation myself and write the code
| by hand rather than reviewing for the umpteenth time when
| Claude splits these new functions between e.g. __init__.py
| and main.py and god knows where, mixing business logic with
| plumbing and transport layers as an art form. God it was
| atrocious during the first few months of FastMCP.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I must say, I do love how this comment has provoked such
| varying responses.
|
| My own observations about using AI to write code is that it
| changes my position from that of an author to a reviewer. And I
| find code review to be a much more exhausting task than writing
| code in the first place, especially when you have to work out
| how and why the AI-generated code is structured the way it is.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| There's a very wide range of programming tasks of differing
| difficulty that people are using / trying to use it for, and
| a very wide range of intelligence amongst the people that are
| using / trying to use it, and who are evaluating its results.
| Hence, different people have very different takes.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > especially when you have to work out how and why the AI-
| generated code is structured the way it is.
|
| You could just ask it? Or you don't trust the AI to answer
| you honestly?
| chmod775 wrote:
| You're anthropomorphizing.
|
| LLMs can't lie nor can they tell the truth. These concepts
| just don't apply to them.
|
| They also cannot tell you what they were "thinking" when
| they wrote a piece of code. If you "ask" them what they
| were thinking, you just get a plausible response, not the
| "intention" that may or may not have existed in some
| abstract form in some layer when the system selected
| tokens*. That information is gone at that point and the LLM
| has no means to turn that information into something a
| human could understand anyways. They simply do not have
| what in a human might be called metacognition. For now.
| There's lots of ongoing experimental research in this
| direction though.
|
| Chances are that when you ask an LLM about their output,
| you'll get the response of either someone who now
| recognized an issue with their work, or the likeness of
| someone who believes they did great work and is now
| defending it. Obviously this is based on the work itself
| being fed back through the context window, which will
| inform the response, and thus it may not be entirely
| useless, but... this is all very far removed from what a
| conscious being might explain about their thoughts.
|
| The closest you can currently get to this is reading the
| "reasoning" tokens, though even those are just some
| selected system output that is then fed back to inform
| later output. There's nothing stopping the system from
| "reasoning" that it should say A, but then outputting B.
| Example: https://i.imgur.com/e8PX84Z.png
|
| * One might say that the LLM itself always considers
| _every_ possible token and assigns weights to them, so
| there wouldn 't even be a single chain of thought in the
| first place. More like... every possible "thought" at the
| same time at varying intensities.
| pipes wrote:
| Or ask another model to tell you what the changes do.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to some other comment? I'm having
| trouble contextualizing your response - pardon the pun.
| cyclopeanutopia wrote:
| And you could first read the thing to which you are
| replying. Don't tell me it was too long.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It was too long, but thankfully AI can summarize so it's
| no excuse anymore.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm not anthropomorphizing. I've been in many situation
| where the AI wrote some code some way and I had to ask
| why, it told me why and then we moved on to better
| solutions as needed. Better if it just wrote the code and
| its reasoning was still in context, but even if it's not,
| it can usually reverse engineer what it wrote well
| enough. Then it's a conversation about whether there is a
| better clearer way to do it, the code improves.
|
| It sounds like you either have access to bad models or
| you are just imagining what it's like to use an LLM in
| this way and haven't actually tried asking it why it
| wrote something. The only judgement you need to make is
| the explanation makes sense or not, not some technical or
| theoretical argument about where the tokens in the
| explanation come from. You just ask questions until you
| can easily verify things for yourself.
|
| Also, pretending that the LLM is still just token
| predicting and isn't bringing in a lot of extra context
| via RAG and using extra tokens for thinking to answer a
| query is just way out there.
| chmod775 wrote:
| You just steamrolled on, pretty much ignoring the comment
| you are replying to, made unkind assumptions, and put
| words in my mouth to boot. I don't mind some aggressive
| argumentation, but this misses the mark so completely
| that I have really no idea how to have a constructive
| conversation this way.
|
| > where the AI wrote some code some way and I had to ask
| why, it told me why
|
| I just explained that it cannot tell you why. It's simply
| not how they work. You might as well tell me that it
| cooked you dinner and did your laundry.
|
| > the code improves.
|
| We can agree on this. The iterative process works. The
| understanding of it is incorrect. If someone's
| understanding of a hammer superficially is "tool that
| drives pointy things into wood", they'll inevitably try
| to hammer a screw at some point - which might even work,
| badly.
|
| > It sounds like you either have access to bad models or
| you are just imagining what it's like to use an LLM in
| this way
|
| Quoting this is really enough. You may imagine me
| sighing.
|
| > Also, pretending that the LLM is still just token
| predicting
|
| Strawman.
|
| Overall your comment is dancing around engaging with what
| is being said, so I will not waste my time here.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Your always reviewing code though. Either a team mates pr or
| maybe your own code in 3 months, or some legacy thing.
| christophilus wrote:
| Human code is still easier to review. Also, I program 80%
| of the time and review PRs 20% of the time. With AI, that
| becomes: I review 80% of the time, and write markdown and
| wait 20% of the time.
| fudfomo wrote:
| Most of this thread is debating whether models are good or bad
| at writing code... however, I think a more important question
| is what we feed the AI with because that dramatically
| determines the quality of the output.
|
| When your agent explores your codebase trying to understand
| what to build, it read schema files, existing routes, UI
| components etc... easily 50-100k tokens of implementation
| detail. It's basically reverse-engineering intent from code.
| With that level of ambiguous input, no wonder the results feel
| like junior work.
|
| When you hand it a structured spec instead including data
| model, API contracts, architecture constraints etc., the agent
| gets 3-5x less context at much higher signal density. Instead
| of guessing from what was built it knows exactly what to build.
| Code quality improves significantly.
|
| I've measured this across ~47 features in a production codebase
| with amedian ratio: 4x less context with specs vs. random agent
| code exploration. For UI-heavy features it's 8-25x. The agent
| reads 2-3 focused markdown files instead of grepping through
| hundreds of KB of components.
|
| To pick up @wek's point about planning from above: devs who get
| great results from agentic development aren't better prompt
| engineers... they're better architects. They write the spec
| before the code, which is what good engineering always was...
| AI just made the payoff for that discipline 10x more visible.
| xtracto wrote:
| The other day I (well, the AI) just wrote a Rust app to merge
| two (huge, GB of data) tables by discovering columns with data
| in common based on text distance (levenshtein and Dice) . It
| worked beautifully
|
| An i have NEVER made one line of Rust.
|
| I dont understand nay-sayers, to me the state of gen.AI is like
| the simpsons quote "worst day so far". Look were we are within
| 5 years of the first real GPT/LLM. The next 5 years are going
| to be crazy exciting.
|
| The "programmer" position will become a "builder". When we've
| got LLMs that generate Opus quality text at 100x speed (think,
| ASIC based models) , things will get crazy.
| npinsker wrote:
| Human minds are built to find patterns, and you should be
| careful not to assume the rate of improvement will continue
| forever based on nothing but a pattern.
| fauchletenerum wrote:
| The overall trend in AI performance will still be up and to
| the right like everything else in computing over the past
| 50 years, improvement doesn't have to be linear
| swingboy wrote:
| Assuming newer, more efficient architectures are
| discovered.
| throwawaytea wrote:
| Just the fact that even retail quality hardware is still
| improving at local LLM significantly is still a great sign.
| If AI quality remained the same, and the cost for local
| hardware dropped to $1000, it would still be the greatest
| thing since the internet IMO. So even if the worst happens
| and all progress stops, I'm still very happy with what we
| got.
| leptons wrote:
| >I'm still very happy with what we got
|
| "One person's _slop_ is another person 's treasure"
|
| I'm not all that impressed with "AI". I often "race" the
| AI by giving it a task to do, and then I start coding my
| own solution in parallel. I often beat the AI, or deliver
| a better result.
|
| Artificial Intelligence is like artificial flavoring.
| It's cheap and tastes passable to most people, but real
| flavors are far better in every way even if it costs
| more.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| At their current stage, this feels like the wrong way to
| use them. I use them fully supervised, (despite the fact
| that feels like I'm fighting the tools), which is kind of
| the best of both worlds. I review every line of code
| before I allow the edit, and if something is wrong, I
| tell it to fix it. It learns over time, especially as I
| set rules in memories, and so the process has sped up, to
| the point that this goes way faster than if I would have
| done that myself. Not all tasks are appropriate for LLMs
| at all, but when they are, this supervised mode is quite
| fast, and I don't believe the output to be slop, but
| anyways I feel like I own every line of code still.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| The happy path for me is with erlang, due to the
| concurrency model the blast radius of an error is
| exceptionally small, so the programming style is to let
| things crash if they go wrong. So, really you are writing
| the happy path code only (most of the time). Combine this
| approach with some very robust tests (does this thing
| pass the tests / behave how we need it to?) then you're
| close to the point of not really caring about the
| implementation at all.
|
| Of course, i still do, but i could see not caring being
| possible down the road with such architectures..
| throwawaytea wrote:
| Home made food is better than anything you can buy too.
| Im 40 but I still drive 30 minutes to my parents once a
| week for dinner because the food they make feels like the
| elixir of life compared to the slop I can buy in trader
| joes, Costco, or most restaurants.
|
| But I'm pretty glad trader joes exists too.
| sjeiuhvdiidi wrote:
| Let me explain the naysayers, they know "programmer" has
| always meant "builder" and just because search is better and
| you can copy and paste faster doesn't mean you've built
| anything.First thing people need to realize is no proprietary
| code is in those databases, and using Ai will ultimately just
| get you regurgitated things people don't really care about.
| Use it all you want, you won't be able to do anything
| interesting, they aren't giving you valuable things for free.
| Anything of value will still take time and knowledge. The
| marketing hype is to reduce wages and prevent competition. Go
| for it.
| fastforwardius wrote:
| I seem to remember doing it in SQL (EDIT_DISTANCE) 20ish
| years ago. While I wouldn't say it worked beautifully, I also
| didn't need to make a single line of Rust :) also no more
| than 2 line s of SQL were needed.
| jqbd wrote:
| And how many years of experience you needed to know what to
| write, and what if you can replace that time with how long
| prompting takes?
| fastforwardius wrote:
| It's an interesting question.
|
| Years of school (reading, calculus etc) to get to the
| point of learning basics of set theory. One day to learn
| basic SQL based on understanding the set theory. Maybe
| few weeks of using SQL at work for ad hoc queries to be
| proficient enough (the query itself wasn't really
| complex).
|
| For the domain itself I was consulting experts to see
| what matters.
|
| I'm not sure that time it would take to know what to
| prompt and verify the results is much different.
|
| Fun fact - management decided that SQL solution wasn't
| enerprisely enough so they hired external consultants to
| build a system doing essentialy that but in Java + formed
| an 8 people internal team to guide them. I heard they
| finished 2 years later with a lot of manual matching.
| dannersy wrote:
| Because if you don't know the language or problem space,
| there are footguns in there that you can't find, you won't
| know what to look for to find them. Only until you try to
| actually use this in a production environment will the issues
| become evident. At that point, you'll have to either know how
| to read and diagnose the code, or keep prompting till you fix
| it, which may introduce another footgun that you didn't know
| that you didn't know.
|
| This is what gets me. The tools can be powerful, but my job
| has become a thankless effort in pointing out people's
| ignorance. Time and again, people prompt something in a
| language or problem space they don't understand, it "works"
| and then it hits a snag because the AI just muddled over a
| very important detail, and then we're back to the drawing
| board because that snag turned out to be an architectural
| blunder that didn't scale past "it worked in my very
| controlled, perfect circumstances, test run." It is getting
| really frustrating seeing this happen on repeat and instead
| of people realizing they need to get their hands dirty, they
| just keep prompting more and more slop, making my job more
| tedious. I am basically at the point where I'm looking for
| new avenues for work. I say let the industry just run rampant
| with these tools. I suspect I'll be getting a lot of job
| offers a few years from now as everything falls apart and
| their $10k a day prompting fixed one bug to cause multiple
| regressions elsewhere. I hope you're all keeping your skills
| sharp for the energy crisis.
| psyklic wrote:
| Before LLMs, I've watched in horror as colleagues
| _immediately_ copy-paste-ran Stack Overflow solutions in
| terminal, without even reading them.
|
| LLM agents are basically the same, except now everyone is
| doing it. They copy-paste-run lots of code without
| meaningfully reviewing it.
|
| My fear is that some colleagues are getting more skilled at
| prompting but less skilled at coding and writing. And the
| prompting skills may not generalize much outside of certain
| LLMs.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The less you know about a domain/language the better AI seems
| to be :)
| snozolli wrote:
| _The next 5 years are going to be crazy exciting._
|
| I don't want exciting. I want a stable, well-paying job that
| allows me to put food on the table, raise a family with a
| sense of security and hope, and have free time.
| neversupervised wrote:
| It's crazy how some people feel the ai and others don't. But
| one group is wrong. It's a matter of time before everyone feels
| the AI.
| lelanthran wrote:
| This is a very one-sided article, unashamedly so.
|
| Where's the references to the decline in quality and embarrassing
| outages for Amazon, Microsoft, etc?
| dboreham wrote:
| Everything you read is in service of someone's business model.
| gnz11 wrote:
| What's your point? Journalists have jobs?
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| NYT doesn't like digital advertisers and the programmers
| who make that possible. They're directly in competition.
| negromcnig wrote:
| journalists are like our own simon willinson: they need to
| put food on their plate by networking with powerful
| entities that fly them out to conferences
| esafak wrote:
| Do we know that it decreased the quality, or introduced more
| opportunities for bugs by simply increasing the velocity? If
| every commit has a fixed probability of having a bug, you'll
| run into more bugs in a week by going faster.
| pydry wrote:
| Do we know it increased the velocity and didnt just churn
| more slop?
|
| Even before AI the limiting factor on all of the teams I ever
| worked on was bad decisions, not how much time it took to
| write code. There seem to be more of those these days.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Do we know that it decreased the quality, or introduced
| more opportunities for bugs by simply increasing the
| velocity?
|
| That's an easy question to answer - you can look at outages
| per feature released.
|
| You may be instead looking at outages per loc written.
| leptons wrote:
| AI is _constantly_ trying to introduce bugs into my code. I
| 've started disabling it when I know exactly where I'm going
| with the code, because the AI is often a lot more confused
| than I am about where the code is going.
| fixxation92 wrote:
| Conversations of the future...
|
| "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an
| office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with
| no advice from AI, he had to _think_ all by himself! "
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an
| office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line,
| with no advice from AI, he had to _think_ all by himself! "
|
| Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much
| smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from
| morning to night the whole long day."
| duskdozer wrote:
| >What's ~~a computer~~ thinking?
| ares623 wrote:
| More likely:
|
| "Dad, I've sent out 1000 applications and haven't had a call
| back. I can't take it anymore. Has it always been like this?"
|
| The Dad: It's not my fault!
| allenu wrote:
| I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now
| people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be
| shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases
| by hand.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| It must have been:
|
| Aliens Atlanteans Time travellers A hoax ...
| johnisgood wrote:
| Hmm, can you think of anything that we could do decades ago
| but cannot do it now, today?
| c0_0p_ wrote:
| Fly supersonic commercially is the only thing I can think
| of
| allenu wrote:
| I was being a little facetious, but there are things that
| most people would find tedious today that we would put up
| with in the past. Writing anything long by hand (letters,
| essays), doing accounting without a spreadsheet, writing a
| game in only assembly language, using punch cards,
| typesetting newspapers and books manually...
| bitwize wrote:
| This was literally part of the premise of _The Jetsons_. George
| 's job was to press a single button while the computer RUDI did
| all the work.
|
| The difference is, _Jetsons_ wasn 't a dystopia (unlike the
| current timeline), so when Mr. Spacely fired George, RUDI would
| take his side and refuse to work until George was re-hired.
| bot403 wrote:
| I had to run Jenkins to build my code. In the snow. And uphill
| on git pull and deploy.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| It's really time that mainstream media picks up on 'agentic
| coding' and the implications of writing software becoming a
| commodity.
|
| I'm an engineer (not only software) by heart, but after seeing
| what Opus 4.6 based agents are capable of and especially the rate
| of improvement, i think the direction is clear.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| I like 4.6 and agents based on it but can only qualify it as
| moderately useful.
| CollinEMac wrote:
| >but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code.
|
| Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?
| dboreham wrote:
| In my direct experience this is mostly true.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| And was true before AI
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'd expect that probably less than 10% of my time is spent
| _actually_ writing code, and not because of AI, but because
| enough of it is spent analyzing failures, reading documents,
| participating in meetings, putting together presentations,
| answering questions, reading code, etc. And even when I have a
| nice, uninterrupted coding session, I still spend a decent
| fraction of that time thinking through the design of how I want
| the change rather than actually writing the code to effect that
| change.
| habinero wrote:
| Yeah, actually writing code is a surprisingly small part of the
| job.
| fraywing wrote:
| I keep getting stuck on the liability problem of this supposed
| "new world". If we take this as far as it goes: AI agent
| societies that designs, architects, and maintains the entire
| stack E2E with little to no oversight. What happens when rogue
| AIs do bad things? Who is responsible? You have to have fireable
| senior engineers that understand deep fundamentals to make sure
| things aren't going awry, right? /s
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Check out the movie Brazil, if you haven't seen it already.
| Incredibly far ahead of its time.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior
| programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to
| do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I
| used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with
| the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday
| it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having
| to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library -
| in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and
| Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just
| minutes.
|
| But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care
| about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can
| do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in
| the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of
| unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I
| remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names
| related to McDonalds)
|
| I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code
| it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's
| not there yet though.
| andoando wrote:
| For any non professional work its there for me.
|
| Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets,
| stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done.
|
| Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.
| leptons wrote:
| All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI.
| Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is
| good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even
| slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much
| rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour
| convincing an AI to do it for me.
| andoando wrote:
| There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do.
| Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for
| elvenlabs
| gedy wrote:
| You might be comparing people who know how to do
| something vs those who don't.
| andoando wrote:
| Im curious though, what do you consider slightly out of the
| ordinary that it fails to do?
| lpnam0201 wrote:
| Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it
| could possibly do. I built a game bot using Win32 API to
| send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to
| recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite
| boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while.
| How could Claude agents possibly do this ? I did use
| Claude to refer docs and API, though.
| DennisP wrote:
| That actually sounds like something Claude could do
| pretty easily.
|
| Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding
| project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of
| youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up
| transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles
| added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles
| itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes.
|
| And using agents to control other applications is pretty
| common.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his
| stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but
| most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.
| leptons wrote:
| Great, and you've taught him to never learn to code.
| That's not as great an achievment as you might think it
| is.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without
| AI._
|
| No, it wouldn't. Merely finding the examples and deps would
| take over an hour.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Back when, we'd just go write a blog post or SO answer so
| the next person wouldn't suffer as much.
|
| Thank god THOSE days are over and everyone just lets
| everyone else suffer alone now
| iijaachok wrote:
| Yes, because search engines are populated with SEO-
| optimized LLM-filled articles that say nothing of value
| anymore. The only reason AI-assisted tools are "better"
| is because Web search is so much worse.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| It's like everyone forgot that the first result for
| anything web-related would be W3schools, and the next 5
| would be spam message boards that tries to scrape all the
| other boards and sends you to a porn site when you click
| on it.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Yeah it is worse now but I don't remember it ever being
| good. If you know where to look and have a trusted set of
| resources curated sure, but of course you won't for
| unfamiliar territory which is exactly what LLMs help
| with.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI.
|
| There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or
| not) that would believe this statement.
|
| If you're argument rests on an insane amount of hyperbole
| (that immediately comes off as just lying), then maybe it's
| not a great argument.
|
| > I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend
| an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.
|
| You're not suggesting that asking CC to build the UI for a
| route planner takes me an hour to type, are you?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor
| or not) that would believe this statement.
|
| It's so galling to see people say shit like this. It's
| like the old build slack in a weekend trope.
| leptons wrote:
| >Wire up authentication system with sso.
|
| Simple npm install, all of it has already been distilled
| into dozens of similar repos. Just pick one, install it,
| and follow the simple use case. 5 minutes if we're in a
| race.
|
| >done Setup websockets
|
| If this takes you more than 5 minutes, then you're a shit
| developer.
|
| >stream audio from mic
|
| Again, another npm install or two, simple POC could take
| 5 minutes.
|
| >transcribe with elvenlabs
|
| I don't know what elvenlabs is, nor do I care, but I
| doubt it's as complex as the OP thinks it is considering
| the rest of their comment was about simple, solved
| problems.
| triyambakam wrote:
| This is the take when you haven't really tried driving these
| tools with much practice
| nickjj wrote:
| I don't think it's that
|
| Here's an example from Gemini with some Lua code:
| label = key:gsub("on%-", ""):gsub("%-", "
| "):gsub("(%a)([%w_']*)", function(f, r) return
| f:upper() .. r:lower() end) if
| label:find("Click") then label =
| label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") elseif
| label:find("Scroll") then label =
| label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") end
|
| I don't know Lua too well (which is why I used AI) but I know
| programming well enough to know this logic is ridiculous.
|
| It was to help convert "on-click-right" into "Right Click".
|
| The first bit of code to extract out the words is really
| convoluted and hard to reason about.
|
| Then look at the code in each condition. It's identical.
| That's already really bad.
|
| Finally, "Click" and "Scroll" are the only 2 conditions that
| can ever happen and the AI knew this because I explained this
| in an earlier prompt. So really all of that code isn't
| necessary at all. None of it.
|
| What I ended up doing was creating a simple map and looked up
| the key which had an associated value to it. No conditions or
| swapping logic needed and way easier to maintain. No AI used,
| I just looked at the Lua docs on how to create a map in Lua.
|
| This is what the above code translated to:
| local on_event_map = { ["on-click"] = "Left Click",
| ["on-click-right"] = "Right Click", ["on-click-
| middle"] = "Middle Click", ["on-click-backward"] =
| "Backward Click", ["on-click-forward"] = "Forward
| Click", ["on-scroll-up"] = "Scroll Up",
| ["on-scroll-down"] = "Scroll Down", }
| label = on_event_map[key]
|
| IMO the above is a lot clearer on what's happening and super
| easy to modify if another thing were added later, even if the
| key's format were different.
|
| Now imagine this. Imagine coding a whole app or a non-trivial
| script where the first section of code was used. You'd have
| thousands upon thousands of lines of gross, brittle code
| that's a nightmare to follow and maintain.
| kansface wrote:
| I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps
| or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to
| optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3
| agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes
| parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't
| do it at all. Don't wait too long.
| habinero wrote:
| > I've generated 250KLoC this week
|
| It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol.
| If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is
| very safe.
| coldtea wrote:
| If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then
| your job is hardly safe.
| motbus3 wrote:
| Managers jobs are more at risk than senior engineers.
|
| My company, and few others I know reduced the number of
| managers by 90% or more.
| kakacik wrote:
| This. We moved to 'agile' roughly at same time llms
| started coming. You know who is mostly missing from the
| wider IT teams landscape now? Most of PMs and BAs, on
| purpose. Who is keeping their work - devs or more like
| devops, surprisingly testers (since our stuff seems
| ridiculously complex to test well for many use cases and
| we can't just break our bank by destroying production by
| fast half-assed deliveries).
|
| And then admins/unix/network/windows/support team, nobody
| replacing those anytime soon. Those few PMs left are
| there only for big efforts requiring organizing many
| teams, and we rarely do those now.
|
| I don't like it, chasing people, babysitting processes
| and so on, but certainly just more work for me.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| you're not responding to op's point, unless you're
| insinuating there won't be any managers ever, which won't
| happen. As long as there is one manager left, OP's point
| remains.
| ajb wrote:
| Agents are new, but dumb coding practices are not.
| Despite what it may seem, the knowledge of how to manage
| development has increased. One practice I haven't seen
| for a while is managing by limiting the number of lines
| changed. (This was a dumb idea because rewriting a
| function or module is sometimes the only way to keep it
| comprehensible - I'm not talking about wholesale
| rewriting, I'm talking about code becoming encrusted with
| conditions because the devs are worried that changing the
| structure would change too many lines)
| sevenzero wrote:
| Less is more, its not a hard thing to understand. These
| companies are accumulating record level tech debt.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| I use these tools a lot, and one thing that has stood out
| to me is that they LOVE to write code. A lot of it. And
| they're not super great at extracting the reusable parts.
| They also love to over-engineer things.
|
| I've taken great pains to get by with as little code as
| possible, because the more code you have, the harder it
| is to change (obviously). And while there are absolutely
| instances in which I'm not super invested in a piece of
| code's ability to be changed, there are definitely
| instances in which I am.
| sevenzero wrote:
| Yea, by my less is more logic its sometimes also
| difficult to do. With that approach people try to become
| clever and write shorter code thats unmaintainable due to
| mental gymnastics other people have to go through when
| reading it. What LLMs are doing is probably going for
| some kind of overengineered "best practice" solution. I
| personally only use them for simple Laravel CRUD apps and
| they are admittedly pretty good at that.
| MadxX79 wrote:
| Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should (add 250kloc)
| bot403 wrote:
| I've worked with a type of (anti?) developer in my career
| that seems to only be able to add code. Never change or
| take it away. It's bizarre. There's some calculation bug,
| then a few lines down some code which corrects it instead
| of just fixing the original lines.
|
| It's bizzare, and as horrible as you might imagine.
|
| And it's been more than one or two people I've seen do
| this.
| MadxX79 wrote:
| Now they have agents.
|
| People need to understand that code is a liability. LLMs
| hasn't changed that at all. You LLM will get every bit as
| confused when you have a bug somewhere in the backend and
| you then work around it with another line of code in the
| front end. line of code
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| They can always generate a new backend prototype from
| scratch.
| pram wrote:
| This sounds like some kind of learned risk aversion, like
| they don't want to assume the responsibility of altering
| whats already there.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| LOL that's it? I generated over 5 million lines of code this
| week. You need to step it up or you're gonna be left behind.
| zahlman wrote:
| You mean, you don't have yes \; >> main.c
|
| running in the background 24/7?
| kubb wrote:
| I left an agent generating code over the weekend, so that I
| can get to 15 million.
|
| What code? Code!
| zahlman wrote:
| > I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at
| all.
|
| Can't do _what_ , precisely?
| thangalin wrote:
| Syntax highlighting rules, initially vibe-coded 40 languages
| and formats in about 10 minutes. What surprised me is when it
| switched the design from a class to the far more elegant single
| line of code: return \file_exists( $file ) ?
| require $file : [];
|
| *
| https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/render/High...
|
| The rules files:
|
| *
| https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
| zazibar wrote:
| >I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the
| code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs.
| It's not there yet though.
|
| Must be nice to still have that choice. At the company I work
| for they've just announced they're cancelling all subscriptions
| to JetBrains, Visual Studio, Windsurf, etc. and forcing every
| engineer to use Claude Code as a cost-saving measure. We've
| been told we should be writing prompts for Claude instead of
| working in IDEs now.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Isn't Visual Studio a one time purchase?
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Thats insane!
| swader999 wrote:
| I didn't renew Jet Brains this month. Been a loyal customer
| and would have quit jobs from 2008 onwards without it.
| DennisP wrote:
| Fwiw, IntelliJ at least has an MCP server so coding agents
| can use the refactoring tools. Don't know about the other
| JetBrains IDEs.
| bredren wrote:
| Me too.
|
| I used to report bugs, read release notes; I was all in on
| the full stack debug capability in pycharm of Django.
|
| The first signs of trouble (with AI specifically) predated
| GitHub copilot to TabNine.
|
| TabNine was the first true demonstration of AI powered code
| completion in pycharm. There was an interview where a
| jetbrains rep lampooned AI's impact on SWE. I was an early
| TabNine user, and was aghast.
|
| A few months later copilot dropped, time passed and now
| here we are.
|
| It was neat figuring out how I had messed up my
| implementations. But I would not trade the power of the CLI
| AI for any *more* years spent painstakingly building
| products on my own.
|
| I'm glad I learned when I did.
| kubb wrote:
| Thoughts and prayers.
| DennisP wrote:
| Even if you're using Claude, canceling the IDEs might be poor
| strategy. Steve Yegge points out in his book that the
| indexing and refactoring tools in IDEs are helpful to AIs as
| well. He mentions JetBrains in particular as working well
| with AI. Your company's IDE savings could be offset by higher
| token costs.
| DennisP wrote:
| Perhaps it would help if I include the quote, so from _Vibe
| Coding_ pages 165-166:
|
| > [IDEs index] your code base with sophisticated
| proprietary analysis and then serve that index to any tool
| that needs it, typically via LSP, the Language Services
| Protocol. The indexing capabilities of IDEs will remain
| important in the vibe coding world as (human) IDE usage
| declines. Those indexes will help AIs find their way around
| your code, like they do for you.
|
| > ...It will almost always be easier, cheaper, and more
| accurate for AI to make a refactoring using an IDE or
| large-scale refactoring tool (when it can) than for AI to
| attempt that same refactoring itself.
|
| > Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ, now host an MCP server,
| which makes their capabilities accessible to coding agents.
| schubart wrote:
| Would you recommend that book?
| DennisP wrote:
| Yes, it's fantastic. Hard to imagine a better resource
| for getting started with vibe coding, on through
| developing large high-quality projects with it. It
| doesn't get into the details of particular tools much, so
| it should stay relevant for a while.
| mchaver wrote:
| I wonder how much cost savings there are in the long term
| when token prices go up, the average developer's ability to
| code has atrophied, and the company code bases have turned
| into illegible slop. I will continue to use LLMs cautiously
| while working hard to maintain my ability to code in my off
| time.
| daveguy wrote:
| You shouldn't have to maintain your ability to code in your
| off time. Is your company one of those that's requiring AI
| only coding?
| gedy wrote:
| Honestly while I know everyone needs a job, just speed run
| all this crap and let the companies learn from making a big
| unmaintainable ball of mud. Don't make the bad situation work
| by putting in your good skills to fix things behind the
| scenes, after hours, etc.
| falkensmaize wrote:
| Management has made it very clear that we're still
| responsible for the code we push even if the llm wrote it.
| So there will be no blaming Claude when things fall apart.
| gedy wrote:
| My personal line is they can't say that if you force devs
| to use LLMs "and be quick about it"
| qudat wrote:
| That's going to give you all a ton of job security in a year
| when we realize that prompt first yields terrible results for
| maintainability.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Or they fire the existing staff who prompted this mess and
| bring in mkinsey to glue the mess together
| sobjornstad wrote:
| This is completely insane, and that's coming from someone who
| does 95% of edits in Claude Code now.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when
| subsidies expire.
| delecti wrote:
| Realistically that's an increase of maybe a couple percent
| of cost per employee. If it truly does end up being a force
| multiplier, 2-5% more per dev is a bargain. I think it's
| exceedingly unlikely that LLMs will replace devs for most
| companies, but it probably will speed up dev work enough to
| justify at _least_ a single-digit percent increase in per-
| dev cost.
| deadbabe wrote:
| "speeding up dev work" is pointless to a company. That
| benefit goes entirely to the developer and does not
| trickle down well.
|
| You might think "ok, we'll just push more workload onto
| the developers so they stay at higher utilization!"
|
| Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new
| feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.
|
| So you think "Ha! Then we'll fire more developers and get
| one guy to do everything!"
|
| Another bad idea for several reason. For one, you are
| increasing the bus factor. Two, most work being done in
| companies at any given time is actually _maintenance_.
| One dev cannot maintain everything by themselves, even
| with the help of LLMs. More eyes on stuff means issues
| get resolved faster, and those eyes need to have real
| knowledge and experience behind them.
|
| Speed is sexy but a poor trade off for quality code
| architecture and expert maintainers. Unless you are a
| company with a literal never ending list of new things to
| be implemented (very few), it is of no benefit.
|
| Also don't forget the outrage when Cursor went from
| $20/month to $200/month and companies quickly cancelled
| subscriptions...
| sobjornstad wrote:
| > Except most companies do not have endless amounts of
| new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting
| idle.
|
| At every place I have ever worked (as well as my personal
| life), the backlog was 10 times longer than anyone could
| ever hope to complete, and there were untold amounts of
| additional work that nobody even bothered adding to the
| backlog.
|
| Some of that probably wouldn't materialize into real work
| if you could stay more on top of it - some of the things
| that eventually get dropped from the backlog were bad
| ideas or would time out of being useful before they got
| implemented even with higher velocity - but I think most
| companies could easily absorb a 300% increase or more in
| dev productivity and still be getting value out of it.
| mekael wrote:
| I've heard estimates of starting at 2k a month per person,
| and thats for the "normal" user-base
| gedy wrote:
| They'll just skip raises and say it's part of your comp for
| increasing your productivity or some tone-deaf BS
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm halfway through Steve Yegge's book _Vibe Coding_. Yegge was
| quoted in the article:
|
| > "We're talking 10 to 20 -- to even 100 -- times as productive
| as I've ever been in my career," Steve Yegge, a veteran coder
| who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents
|
| That tool has been pretty popular. It was a couple hundred
| thousand lines of code and he wrote it in a couple months. His
| book is about using AI to write major new projects and get them
| reliable and production-ready, with clean, readable code.
|
| It's basically a big dose of solid software engineering
| practices, along with enough practice to get a feel for when
| the AI is screwing up. He said it takes about a year to get
| really good at it.
|
| (Yegge, fwiw, was a lead dev at Amazon and Google, and a well-
| known blogger since the early 2000s.)
| xenadu02 wrote:
| It's an accelerator. A great tool if used well. But just like all
| the innovations before it that were going to replace programmers
| it simply won't.
|
| I used Claude just the other day to write unit test coverage for
| a tricky system that handles resolving updates into a consistent
| view of the world and handles record resurrection/deletion. It
| wrote great test coverage _because it parsed my headerdoc and
| code comments that went into great detail about the expected
| behavior_. The hard part of that implementation was the prose I
| wrote and the thinking required to come up with it. The actual
| lines of code were already a small part of the problem space. So
| yeah Claude saved me a day or two of monotonously writing up test
| cases. That 's great.
|
| Of course Claude also spat out some absolute garbage code using
| reflection to poke at internal properties because the access
| level didn't allow the test to poke at the things it wanted to
| poke at, along with some methods that were calling themselves in
| infinite recursion. Oh and a bunch of lines that didn't even
| compile.
|
| The thing is about those errors: most of them were a fundamental
| inability to reason. They were technically correct in a sense. I
| can see how a model that learned from other code written by
| humans would learn those patterns and apply them. In some
| contexts they would be best-practice or even required. But the
| model can't reason. It has no executive function.
|
| I think that is part of what makes these models both amazingly
| capable and incredibly stupid at the same time.
| gist wrote:
| For one thing comments here appear to apply to the quality and
| issues today not potentially going forward. Quality will change
| quicker than anyone expects. I am wondering how many people at HN
| remember when the first Mac came out with Mac Paint and then
| Pagemaker or Quark. That didn't evolve anywhere nearly as quickly
| as AI appears to be.
|
| Also I am not seeing how anyone is considering that what a
| programmer considers quality and what 'gets the job done' (as
| mentioned in the article) matters in any business. (Example with
| typesetting is original laser printers were only 300dpi but after
| a short period became 1200dpi 'good enough' for camera ready
| copy).
| IntrepidPig wrote:
| > "The reason that tech generally -- and coders in particular --
| see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the
| creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human
| parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you," Dash says. "And
| in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human,
| soulful parts to you."
|
| This doesn't really make sense to me. GenAI ostensibly removes
| the drudgery from other creative endeavors too. You don't need to
| make every painstaking brushstroke anymore; you can get to your
| intended final product faster than ever. I think a common
| misunderstanding is that the drudgery is really inseparable from
| the soulful part.
|
| Also, I think GenAI in coding actually has the exact same failure
| modes as GenAI in painting, music, art, writing, etc. The output
| lacks depth, it lacks context, and it lacks an understanding of
| its own purpose. For most people, it's much easier to intuitively
| see those shortcomings of GenAI manifest in traditional creative
| mediums, just because they come more naturally to us. For coding,
| I suspect the same shortcomings apply, they just aren't as clear.
|
| I mean, at the end of the day if writing code is just to get
| something that works, then sure, let's blitz away with LLMs and
| not bother to understand what we're doing or why we do it
| anymore. Maybe I'm naive in thinking that coding has creative
| value that we're now throwing away, possibly forever.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Maybe they mean more soulful like a fellow that blacksmiths his
| own tools and metal fasteners prior to constructing something.
| I'd personally think this person was a badass, but until wwiii,
| it's so impractical and seems arbitrary because why stop there
| - get more soulful and mine your own ore too.
| sjeiuhvdiidi wrote:
| It's all nonsense. It's just better search, intelligence in not
| artificial. They are trying to convince everyone that they don't
| need to pay programmers. That's all, all it is. It'll work on the
| ignorant who'll take less money to make sure it works and fix the
| bugs, which is mostly what they were paying for anyway. They just
| want to devalue the work of the people they are reliant on.
| Nothing new.
| neversupervised wrote:
| I think you're a bit behind on your world view. Just because
| it's inconvenient to you that non coders can now code, doesn't
| make it untrue.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| No, they can't.
|
| It has nothing to do with inconvenience.
|
| I really like that layman now make these statements - they
| know better than people working in the industry for decades.
| habinero wrote:
| None of them understand the first thing about what the job
| actually is, or they wouldn't try to brag about the 200K
| LoC they generated lol
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| how many times in the history of computer programming has there
| been an end to computer programming as we know it, successfully,
| and how many times predicted?
|
| I can think of one successfully, off hand, although you could
| probably convince me there was more than one.
|
| the principle phrase being "as we know it", since that implies a
| large scale change to how it works but it continues afterwards,
| altered.
| mech422 wrote:
| Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my
| career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it
| back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs
| was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD
| 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0
| 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct
| push depending on your area of programming
|
| TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way
| to go before it's the 'end of computer programming as we know
| it'
|
| edit: formatting
| kuboble wrote:
| Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the
| programming as we (at least some of us) knew it.
|
| When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books
| outside of library, nobody to ask for days.
|
| I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how
| to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.
| mech422 wrote:
| Hmm - I'm not sure I'd say that 'changed programming' - but
| the internet in general changed 'learning to program'. I
| can remember when I first discovered gopher and found I
| could read tons recent material for free, or finding
| stonybrook on the web - that was like a gold mine of
| algorithms! :-D
| joefourier wrote:
| I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to
| understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler,
| wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header
| file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory?
|
| E.g.
|
| void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (
| _compar)(const void_ , const void* ));
|
| And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have
| gotten a manual or two with it? Documentation from the pre-
| Internet age tended to be much better than today.
| mech422 wrote:
| Yeah - but you have to be a good enough programmer to
| really understand the headers.. the 'bootstrapping'
| problem was real :-) Especially if you didn't live in a
| metropolitan/college area. My local library was really
| short on programming books - especially anything 'in
| depth'. Also, 'C' was considered a "professional's
| language" back then - so bookstores/libraries were more
| likely to have books on BASIC then 'C'
| rustyzig wrote:
| What kind of modern C wizardry is that? qsort was:
| qsort(base, nel, width, compar) char *base;
| int (*compar)();
| fweimer wrote:
| COBOL certainly had a lasting impact, but only for some
| application domains. The rest didn't seem to be particularly
| successful or impactful. Maybe RAD if you consider office
| application macros and end user report generation in it.
| (Spreadsheets extended programming to non-programmers and had
| a long-lasting impact, but I wouldn't call them RAD.)
| mech422 wrote:
| Thats sorta the point... at one time or another, those were
| all projected to be 'the end of programming as we know
| it'...
|
| Hell, COBOL's origins was in IBM wanting to make
| programming an 'entry level' occupation.
|
| Oddly enough, spreadsheets had a huge impact (and still run
| a lot of companies behind the scenes :-P ) But I can't
| remember anyone claiming they would 'end programming' ?
| ralferoo wrote:
| FWIW I worked for a company from 2002 to 2006 that still had
| quite a large COBOL team even then. Some of the team members
| were also in their 20s and they'd been hired and trained up
| in COBOL.
| mech422 wrote:
| I started by working on back-end accounting systems - most
| of those seemed to be COBOL ... or _SHUDDER_ RPG.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| OK, those are all ones that didn't change programming as we
| know it, but some came closer than others right?
|
| I definitely considered some of those in my list of failed
| revolutions.
|
| My one completely successful revolution is moving from punch
| card programming.
| mech422 wrote:
| Oh yeah - thats a good one...
|
| Maybe the move from teletype to CRT's as well ?
| fweimer wrote:
| What's the one successful one? Visicalc?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would say the one that definitely changed programming was
| moving from the punch card era. A lot of these others that
| people are mentioning I don't think really changed
| programming, they just looked like they were going to.
| rzmmm wrote:
| Someone compared LLM in 2020s to GUI in 80s and 90s. Graphical
| interfaces didn't replace text interface, but it just became
| additional to it.
| bikelang wrote:
| If coding truly becomes effortless to produce - and by that
| extension a product becomes near free to produce - then I find it
| quite odd that the executive class thinks their businesses won't
| be completely up ended by a raging sea of competition.
| postsantum wrote:
| The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic
| mirsadm wrote:
| That is already the struggle. There is too much stuff
| already.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| All that stuff is shit though.
| delecti wrote:
| Is _all_ of it shit, or you just can 't find the good
| stuff? "The struggle will completely shift to how to get
| traffic" is from the business side, and you're
| experiencing it from the customer side.
| bot403 wrote:
| The markets seem to agree with you and are pricing accordingly.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| All run of the mill software is gone or on borrowed time. Why
| pay a subscription for a product that I can get something
| Claude to build it for me.
|
| Before I was building tools, now I am building full
| applications in less time than I did before for tools.
|
| What will be around for a while is where you need an expert in
| the loop to drive the AI. For example enterprise applications.
| You simply can't hand that off to an AI at this point.
| dominotw wrote:
| no one wants your vibecoded full applications though. not
| sure why you are building them.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| I am building them because I am using them to do my work
| faster.
|
| I'm not selling anything, but I can see the quality of what
| is created and it is on-par with much of the stuff on the
| App store.
|
| No one would even notice that it is a co-creation unless I
| mentioned the time to create it.
|
| Just to be clear. Vibe coding implies that you are not
| reviewing the code that is created, or even knowing what is
| being created. That is not what is happening.
| dominotw wrote:
| > I am building them because I am using them to do my
| work faster.
|
| interesting. any examples you can share?
| bdangubic wrote:
| I used a bunch of tools from https://setapp.com/ and no
| longer subscribe. I used to pay for Linear for all my
| personal projects, built one with CC that perfectly fits
| my needs... I also built a myriad of small tools that
| help me automate bunch of busy work I used to do
| manually, both for professional and personal projects
| gedy wrote:
| > I am building them because I am using them to do my
| work faster.
|
| You sound like CTO at my company rewriting stable
| libraries in languages he is familiar with and calling it
| 100x...
| AstroBen wrote:
| Can we see the applications?
| xienze wrote:
| ... no.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| They are in work, so sorry no. But I can tell you started
| off
|
| - Getting Claude to do the work
|
| - creating in python tools
|
| - Docker apps
|
| - XCode
| some_random wrote:
| No, that's exactly what at least some of them think and it's
| why the market has been so volatile lately.
| glaslong wrote:
| They're going to have a fast and ruthless testing of whether
| their product senses and abilities to attract and trap
| customers were actually skill or lucky positioning, as
| competition explodes from every direction, including from
| within customer and user bases.
| igor47 wrote:
| I'm not normally a fan of the NYT but this wasn't too bad. It
| passed the Gel-Mann test, and is clearly written by someone who
| knows the field well, even though the selection of quotes skews
| to towards outliers -- I think Yeggie for instance is pretty far
| out of the mainstream in his views on LLMs, whether ahead or
| sideways.
|
| As a result a lot of the responses here are either quibbles or
| cope disguised as personal anecdotes. I'm pretty worried about
| the impact of the LLMs too, but if you're not getting use out of
| them while coding, I really do think the problem is you.
|
| Since people always want examples, I'll link to a PR in my
| current hobby project, which Claude code helped me complete in
| days instead of weeks. https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68
| Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services --
| it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to
| model a complicated domain (the rules to DnD 5e, including the
| 2014 and the 2024 revisions of those rules), integrating with
| existing code, thinking through complex integrations including
| with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm
| just steering
| colkassad wrote:
| I've found LLMs to be extremely powerful in research projects.
| A lot of code related to research is very bespoke by its
| nature. Using Codex, I've been able to iterate on ideas that I
| would never had the time or courage to explore before. As for
| code quality/brevity, it doesn't really matter in this context
| as long as it works. And it's incredible to have this companion
| that understands broadly every aspect of tangential knowledge
| required to execute an idea. I do think it helps that I have
| over 25 years of experience in my domain (geospatial), which
| helps me guardrail my interactions and get good results in as
| few shots as possible.
| dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv wrote:
| > in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human,
| soulful parts to you.
|
| I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox,
| learning along the way and producing something of value at the
| end.
|
| Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of
| micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.
| caseyf wrote:
| +1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by
| throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest
| layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy
| because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend
| all day talking to as if it were a human
| someprick wrote:
| Lurked for >10y here. Created an account just to say, "+1
| well said."
| rjh29 wrote:
| The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who
| love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it,
| beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former
| are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and
| no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to
| make crud apps.
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months,
| maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't
| be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.
| DennisP wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "builder."
|
| If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it
| real" then that person is massively enabled.
| gedy wrote:
| Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of
| following through a logical product, even if they start
| using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier.
|
| The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them
| explain themselves to others of course.
| DennisP wrote:
| There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable
| of delivering products, who have ideas that are too
| ambitious to do on their own.
| gedy wrote:
| Agreed, that's not really who I was referring too.
| stavros wrote:
| So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in
| downloading an already-made app when you can just
| trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively
| enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an
| audience of exactly one.
| DennisP wrote:
| For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger
| projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that
| they never could have done otherwise.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Strongly disagree. You think you'd be able to prompt your
| way through creating an app with even half the feature
| set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time
| consuming to be able to think through how the app should
| work for many use cases you care about or didn't think
| about. This time isn't free. Now consider having to do
| this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count
| on introducing regressions when your next prompt is
| incompatible with existing features. If you are not
| retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.
| stavros wrote:
| You think you were able to prompt your way through
| creating hello world five years ago? Models improve and
| they need less and less guidance.
|
| Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use
| cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own
| than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve
| my exact needs.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| I'm not saying that there's no need for specialty apps
| optimized for specific use cases or that you can't use
| llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only
| that the time to think through how the app should work
| and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it
| was last year if you were given the worlds best team of
| software engineers and they'd code to your product
| requirements. You'd only take this path for apps where
| the time tradeoff is worth it vs "off the shelf" apps.
| stavros wrote:
| The issue is that off the shelf apps were made at a time
| when it was too expensive to make apps. Everyone uses 2%
| of Word, Photoshop, etc, it's just a different 2% for
| each.
|
| You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it
| to be worth it, not the entire app.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| How would you address user requests? Tailor-make a custom
| app for every user?
| stavros wrote:
| Cars are here and you're wondering how someone could
| possibly make a faster horse. You wouldn't address user
| requests. You aren't a business. The users all make their
| own apps for themselves.
| notpachet wrote:
| Cars are here and we're all choking on our own
| atmospheric excrement, so...
| ori_b wrote:
| Assuming AI lives up to the marketing: Why would someone
| use an app instead of promoting their agent to figure out
| how to get something done?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Yall's blood-diamond-ass mommy bots are going to replace
| bullshit with bullshit and call it a win. The last
| datacenter will run out of coal and water and we'll be
| asking: "but _how_ in the world am I going to make this
| Todo app? "
| crocodile10203 wrote:
| "bvilders" right now its mostly people who want to build a
| substandard app and shill it everywhere.
| ori_b wrote:
| Doordash has also enabled home cooks; they no longer have to
| worry about smashing together ingredients by hand to make
| dinner. They just prompt the app to make them the food they
| want.
|
| Doordash is the future of home cooking.
| falkensmaize wrote:
| Thinking carefully about the details of implementation
| MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something "built" fast
| isn't and should not be the only consideration.
|
| I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car.
| It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse
| than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who
| have thought carefully about every aspect of its
| construction.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Imagine if your operating system or compiler were written by
| the sort of person that thinks " _Coders who love the art of
| programming ... are in for a rough time._ "
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Why not, normies love to talk with the computer.
| rikroots wrote:
| Well I do seem to spent a fair amount of my developer time
| swearing at my laptop screen. And then there's that time I
| spend just prior to writing code just staring at the wall
| while I figure out what sort of code I want to write - if I
| can repackage that wall-staring time into "time spent
| consulting with AI about approaches and architecture
| decisions" I'm sure my engineering manager will think more
| kindly of me ...
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I'm puzzled why they don't speak aloud. Isn't it more
| natural AI interface? How difficult it is to connect a
| microphone to speech to text engine and connect that to AI?
| And then speak aloud. Your manager will be happy to hear
| you work.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| It's easier to fake humanity through toneless text with
| narrow context and low expectstions, I think. A chatbot
| you type to is of course going to impress easier
| IanCal wrote:
| To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic
| problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can
| have an llm setup the test harnesses.
|
| I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice
| analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken
| time but just wasn't interesting or hard.
|
| Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would
| rather just have done? You'd install a package if it existed or
| hand off the work to a junior if that process was easy enough,
| that kind of thing. Those are places you could probably use an
| LLM.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you
| would rather just have done?
|
| Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking...
|
| You know. Chores.
|
| Not my software, I actually _enjoy_ building that
| DennisP wrote:
| I enjoy solving interesting problems in software. But when
| I was doing it for a living, the majority of my work was
| pretty tedious. I'd have been thrilled to turn over that
| part to AI and spend all my time doing the interesting
| stuff.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is a fools errand
|
| We are paid to do the tedious stuff _because_ it is
| tedious. If we actually ever succeed in automating away
| the tedious stuff, we 're out of work
| DennisP wrote:
| There definitely is economic value in solving the more
| challenging problems. Junior devs who can only do the
| tedious parts have lower salaries.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| There are way fewer challenging problems that people are
| willing to pay me to solve.
|
| Sure I would love to be working on some cutting edge
| challenging stuff, but the reality is it has been much
| more realistic to do the tedious stuff for pay instead
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You think people are still getting senior level comp when
| the job is prompting llm? Ha!
| sph wrote:
| Don't you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get
| to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest
| of the day.
|
| I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the
| same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I
| have so much more time to pursue my passions.
|
| Isn't the future great?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the
| same salary just for two hours of actual work per day
|
| I don't believe any of this
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the
| same salary just for two hours of actual work per day.
|
| Great. Once your boss notices your actual work has
| decreased, he'll adjust compensation, increase workload,
| or both.
| apsurd wrote:
| You forgot the /s at the end.
|
| Can't imagine you really think "the market forces" all
| point toward a utopia for the _workers_? We 're all just
| gonna get paid for 2 hours of work a day and post pics
| from the beach with a special shout-out to Claude?
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm surprised you've had three replies so far that didn't
| notice your sarcasm.
|
| But we've been automating the tedious work since the
| 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining
| about imminent job loss when the first compilers were
| invented. Maybe some jobs _were_ lost, temporarily, but
| ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software
| we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and
| paying them better, because each one provided so much
| more value.
|
| When the machines are able to do the hard stuff better
| than humans, that's when we'll really be in trouble.
| sph wrote:
| I do not believe that past performance is a guarantee of
| future results. The era of well paid programmers in great
| demand is pretty much over, and it's not only because of
| AI. Even if machines are dumb enough they require
| supervision, the big bosses do not care and will always
| prefer the dumb machine if it saves them money vs hiring
| a junior dev. It means the poor sods that supervise these
| machines will have to work harder to keep up with demand.
| DennisP wrote:
| Maybe that'll happen one day, but it hasn't so far. As of
| this month, Glassdoor reports the median total pay for
| software developers across all industries and experience
| levels as $149K.
|
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-
| salary-...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| This but unironically. We're at a point where there is
| still a gap between what managers expect and how fast AI
| can work. I genuinely do have days where I finish a few
| tickets and I'm done.
| apsurd wrote:
| interesting comparison to cooking. cooking is a chore and
| takes effort and people enjoy cooking.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Eating is also not really optional
|
| If you're going to spend a pretty good chunk of your
| lifetime eating, you might as well get good at it so you
| can enjoy the food you make
| IanCal wrote:
| Do you want to eat good food or make good food? Is doing
| the dishes something you hand to a machine or do you
| always do it by hand? Are there any ingredients you buy
| pre-made (pesto, curry pastes, do you make your own panko
| breadcrumbs)?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| You can enjoy doing woodworking without power tools but
| that's irrelevant to a job where people want it done fast
| with power tools.
| wsve wrote:
| Woodworking analogy for AI is not "power tools vs
| handsaw", its "power tools vs. wood 3D printer". You
| don't do any of the creating, you only ideate and allow
| the machine to do all the creating. It's simply not wood
| working anymore. Its something else entirely
| IanCal wrote:
| You don't have to choose between entirely hand coded and
| entirely AI built code.
| paradox460 wrote:
| A friend was recently redoing his kitchen. They hired a
| carpenter for cabinetry, and his wife asked him if he
| would be willing to make it with only hand tools.
|
| Carpenter told her he'd be happy to, it would take 8
| weeks longer, cost more, and probably wouldn't look any
| better than the regular way
| IanCal wrote:
| Absolutely everything about it in equal measure? You live
| environment config, setting up test harnesses, coding the
| complex part all identically the same? Nothing you would
| hand off?
|
| Do you find there are zero chores in software development
| and everything is an identical delight?
| relativeadv wrote:
| But you don't actually do any of that, do you? Instead, you
| get tired and lazy and attempt to have the LLM solve those
| hard problems for you too. You just don't tell others about
| it.
| DennisP wrote:
| What an odd bit of moralizing. GP said they enjoy doing the
| hard parts, in which case they probably do them, because
| it's fun. If they actually don't enjoy it, there's nothing
| wrong with them using the LLM, when it's up to the task,
| and then just checking to make sure the code is good.
| crocodile10203 wrote:
| I mean if > 30% of my work is drudgery, I have failed already.
| arcxi wrote:
| amidst this whole AI craze it's illuminating to learn how many
| programmers secretly hated programming all along
| sph wrote:
| It's clear at this point that the term programmer was used to
| refer to two very different types of people.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I don't know if it's "hate" rather than "a means to an ends".
| I love learning new languages, and coding. But it was always
| a means to an ends. The dopamine hit always came from seeing
| the project compile and do something.
| m0llusk wrote:
| There are multiple ends in conflict. Code skillfully
| constructed using abstractions that fit well to the problem
| space can be extended, maintained, and refactored as
| necessary to serve customers and markets from high to low
| level over long periods of time with all the social and
| industrial change that comes with that. Simply putting in
| place mechanisms that deliver what is needed now end up
| unintentionally cutting off future variants, alternative
| uses, longevity, and robustness all to minimize perceived
| costs.
|
| And it isn't so much that one approach may be better than
| another. That is going to depend on context and available
| resources and more. What we are seeing is the short term
| being served to the absolute exclusion of thought about the
| longer term. Maybe if that goes fast and well enough then
| it will be sufficient, but churning out code bases that
| endure is a challenge that is only starting to be tested.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Yeah and especially the satisfaction that you were able to
| make a user delighted to use your thing. Fixing bugs,
| making things faster, adding new features, for me
| personally I do it because I feels really good when a
| customer loves to use the thing I've built.
|
| Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have
| prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still
| chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users'
| time.
| wsve wrote:
| This is exactly how I feel. I knew it already to an extent
| from my time in college, but so many people come into this
| industry because they want to be able to produce the end
| product, or just have a stable job that makes good money.
| Neither of those are bad reasons to get into this profession,
| but it does make me sad how few peers I have who do
| programming because they're passionate about the act of
| programming. The problem solving, the dance of using
| programming languages to communicate efficiently and robustly
| to both machines and humans... I'm very sad how
| enthusiastically so many of my peers just toss that away.
| paradox460 wrote:
| I think a lot of us like solving novel problems. But the
| menial drudgery of most modern software, where you're writing
| code in an app that was written in a week 8 years ago and
| then had mountains of "get it done quickly and we can improve
| it later" over the years, wears on everyone. Much as the
| advent of decent cordless tools revolutionized "workman"
| trades, ai helps programmers
| barnabee wrote:
| I like designing data, algorithms, and systems. I like picking
| the right tools for the job. I like making architectural and
| user interface (CLI, configuration format, GUI, whatever)
| decisions.
|
| Actually typing code is pretty dull. To the extent that I
| rarely do it full time (basically only when prototyping or
| making very simple scripts etc.), even though I love making
| things.
|
| So for me, personally, LLMs are great. I'm making more software
| (and hardware) than ever, mostly just to scratch an itch.
|
| Those people that really love it should be fine. Hobbies aren't
| supposed to make you money anyway.
|
| I don't have much interest in maintaining the existence of
| software development/engineering (or anything else) as a
| profession if it turns out it's not necessary. Not that I think
| that's really what's happening. Software engineering will
| continue as a profession. Many developers have been doing
| barely useful glue work (often as a result of
| bad/overcomplicated abstractions and tooling in the first
| place, IMO) and perhaps _that_ won 't be needed, but plenty
| more engineers will continue to design and build things just
| more effectively and with better tools.
| staplers wrote:
| The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products
| for over 100 years and yet product quality, material
| stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still
| dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public.
|
| Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing
| utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It
| may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and
| craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-
| produce vanilla products.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made
| products for over 100 years and yet product quality,
| material stability
|
| Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere
| to be found.
| dmd wrote:
| I would generally put "stability" and "quality" as
| attributes of mass production far more than that of
| handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality
| product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more
| likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production
| was that suddenly you could make a million identical
| perfect products.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| True, but motivations for mass production also are
| motivations for making things worse off overall.
| barnabee wrote:
| Agree with this. I think LLMs allow more time to bring
| these things to the fore and more leverage to do them cost
| efficiently.
| galactus wrote:
| I think reducing what LLMs do to << typing >> is misleading.
| If it was just typing, you could simply use speech-to-text.
| But LLMs do far more than that, they shape the code itself.
| And I think we lose something when we delegate that work to
| LLMs
| jodleif wrote:
| Agreed. Also, it takes time to understand a domain
| properly- so the innate slowness of coding helps with
| letting things "simmer" in the back of the mind.
| sieste wrote:
| The art is to decide when shaping the code yourself is
| worth your time. Not only financially but also experience
| gain and job satisfaction.
| barnabee wrote:
| It's not that they replace the act of typing, so much as
| figuring out how to express the specific algorithm or data
| structure in a given programming language, typing _that_ ,
| debugging it, etc.
|
| Once I can describe something well, that's most of the
| interesting part (to me) done.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| We do lose something, but really I still see it as an
| extension of autocomplete.
|
| I had some pieces of code I wrote I was quite proud of:
| well documented, clear code yet clever designs and
| algorithm.
|
| But really what always mattered most to me was designing
| the solution. Then the coding part, even though I take some
| pride in the code I write, was most a mean to an end.
| Especially once I start having to add things like data
| validation and API layers, plotting analysis results and so
| many other things that are time consuming but easy and imho
| not very rewarding
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| You can always code by hand as a hobby.
|
| If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find
| it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the
| commentary section here that there's a perception that writing
| programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness
| is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a
| millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like
| thinking. I don't think many of us spend time, wondering if the
| welder enjoys the torch or if a cheaper shop weld is robbing
| the human welder of the satisfaction of a field weld. And we
| don't shed so much ink wondering if digital spreadsheets are a
| moral good or not because perhaps they robbed the accountant of
| the satisfaction of holding a beautiful quill in hand dipped
| expertly in carefully selected ink. You're lucky if you enjoy
| your job, I think most of us find a way to learn to enjoy our
| work or at least tolerate it.
|
| I just wish all the moaning would end. Code generation is not
| new, and that the state of the art is now as good at
| translating high-level instructions into a program at least as
| well as the bottom 10% of programmers is a huge win for
| humanity. Work that could be trivially automated, but is not
| only because of the scarcity of programming knowledge is going
| to start disappearing. I think the value creation is going to
| be tremendous and I think it will take years for it to
| penetrate existing workflows and for us to recognize the value.
| notpachet wrote:
| > at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers
|
| I don't think this is the flex you think it is... in my
| experience, the bottom 10% of programmers are actively
| harmful and should never be allowed near your codebase.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Quite a few people think that about Claude code. I disagree
| with them, personally, but I think we can agree that AI
| code generation is qualitatively at least as good as the
| worst human professionals. I think we would also probably
| agree that the state of the art today is not as good as the
| very best.
|
| The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I
| would say that state of the art models completely surpass
| any individual's productive output.
| apsurd wrote:
| > And we don't shed so much ink wondering if digital
| spreadsheets are a moral good or not because perhaps they
| robbed the accountant...
|
| Caught my eye. I _do_ think we should wonder and hold
| intentionality around products, especially digital products,
| like the spreadsheet. Software _is_ different. It 's a
| limitless resource with limitless instantaneous reach. A good
| weld is beautiful in its own right, but it's not that.
|
| The spreadsheet in particular changed the way millions of
| people work. Is it more productive? Is an army of middle-
| managers orienting humanity through the lens of a literal
| 2x2cm square a net good?
|
| I say we should moralize on that.
| whateveracct wrote:
| since when has velocity or volume of codegen been the
| bottleneck for any business?
|
| i write less code than my AI-using coworkers but I have as
| much or more impact. Coding wasn't so hard that I need to
| spend time learning a new proprietary tech stack with a
| subscription fee lol. I believe plenty of engineers did suck
| enough and computers to benefit tho. That is where Anthropic
| makes their money.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Yea! Back to my amazing Pax Americana of friendly neighbors,
| high trust in my authorities, and cheerful joyous days in oeace
| and harmony with my fellow man, complete with gum drop smiles
| and firm faith in my institutions. A truly brave new world
| InfamousRece wrote:
| I'd love to outsource all the boring, tedious parts of my job
| to LLM. Unfortunately it is the upper management who decide
| which parts of my job are boring.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Back in the day, programming was done on punch cards. In 20
| years, that's how kids will see typing out lines of program code
| by hand.
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| At the rate things have been going, that is likely to happen in
| 20 days rather than 20 years.
| znort_ wrote:
| different things. adding levels of abstraction is not the same
| as having a statistical model generate abstractions for you.
|
| you can still call it spec-programming but if you don't audit
| your generated code then you're simply doing it wrong; you just
| don't realize that yet because you've been getting away with it
| until now.
| yubainu wrote:
| In the near future, a "good programmer" might not be defined by
| someone who can write bug-free, clear code, but rather by someone
| who can prompt for code that works consistently within the
| context of AI. If that happens, I'll have to find a different
| job.
| shinycode wrote:
| That's the exact definition our CEO gave of our job this week.
| That's how he sees and expects us to work now. I feel some
| anxiety because that's too much too fast. We went from << we
| need to fix every single bug we encounter >> to << it doesn't
| matter if there's bugs as long as we ship a feature fast >>
| olsondv wrote:
| At least at my company, we have never really cared how it gets
| done, even before AI. It just has to work (ideally bug-free and
| maintainable) by the deadline. If you can keep up with shorter
| deadlines, more power to you. It's basically a modern John
| Henry vs the steam drill.
| nenadg wrote:
| sensationalism give it a couple of months
| allreduce wrote:
| I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If
| you don't have capital or can do something else you will be
| homeless.
| ipnon wrote:
| But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to
| cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this
| democratize software construction?
| allreduce wrote:
| It commoditizes software construction.
|
| The resources to learn how to construct software are already
| free. However learning requires effort, which made learning
| to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and
| build a better life through skill. This is democratization.
|
| Now the skill needed to build software is starting to
| approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an
| AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the
| differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather
| cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and
| software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape
| poverty through skill closes.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Did ms word usher in a surge of novel writing? Not really
| apparent.
| gf000 wrote:
| Well, there are so many more lower hanging fruits that LLMs can
| actually replace before they get to developers -- basically
| every middle manager, and a significant chunk of all white
| collar jobs.
|
| I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced -
| probably less will be needed and the exact work will be
| transformed a bit, but an expert human still has to be in the
| loop, otherwise all you get is a bunch of nonsense.
|
| Nonetheless, it may very well transform society and we will
| have to adapt to it.
| allreduce wrote:
| Not all software development will be automated immediatly.
| But I've noticed that many skills I've built are lessened in
| worth with every model release.
|
| Having a lot of specifics about a programming environment
| memorized for example used to be the difference between
| building something in a few hours and a week, but now is
| pretty unimportant. Same with being able to do some quick
| data wrangling on the command line. LLMs are also good at
| parsing a lot of code or even binary format quickly and
| explaining how it works. That used to be a skill. Knowing a
| toolbox of technologies to use is needed less. Et cetera.
|
| They haven't come for the meat of what makes a good engineer
| yet. For example, the systems-level interfacing with external
| needs and solving those pragmatically is still hard. But the
| tide is rising.
| samiv wrote:
| The capitalists and industrialists have waited for
| centuries to get rid of paid labor. Imagine the profits
| once the cost of human work gets out of the loop!
|
| Of course the question that is left unanswered is how the
| economy will work there's no one left with purchasing
| power. But I guess the answer to this is, the same way it
| works now in any developing country without much of a
| middle class.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| >I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced
|
| Most of us will probably need to shift to security. While you
| can probably build AI specifically to make things more
| secure, that implies it could also attack things as well, so
| it ends up being a cat-and-mouse game that adjusts to what
| options are available.
| olsondv wrote:
| I don't see middle managers taking the initial brunt unless
| they truly are just pushing papers around. At companies of
| sufficient size, they do play a role of separation between C
| suite and the grunts. To me, certain low-performing grunts
| will be the first out. Then a team reorg to rebalance. Then
| some middle managers will be out as fewer of them can handle
| multiple teams.
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| Agree. Marketing, Finance, Legal, already having huge impact
| for junior positions.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| you know, natural attrition is still attrition.
| flux3125 wrote:
| > probably less will be needed and the exact work will be
| transformed a bit
|
| My guess is the opposite: they'll throw 5-10x more work at
| developers and expect 10x more output, while the marginal
| cost is basically just a Claude subscription per dev.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| Yep. I own a software shop and yesterday was when I realized
| that I'm no longer going to be a 1%er doing this.
| dominotw wrote:
| what happened yesterday?
| 0x262d wrote:
| A lot of people expect to be owning the capital. However I also
| just don't think the technology will displace programmers that
| quickly.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Visual Basic was the end of programming as we knew it...until it
| wasn't.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to
| write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine
| instruction set.
|
| It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a
| huge need for this new kind of programmers.
| Nevermark wrote:
| The psycho engineering of model prompts does feel very Phillip K.
| Dick.
|
| If your base prompt informs the model they are a human software
| developer in a Severed situation, it gets even closer.
| suheilaaita wrote:
| I'm from an accounting/finance background and spent about 10
| years in Big4. I was always into tech, but never software
| development because writing code (as I thought) takes years to
| master, and I had already chosen accounting.
|
| Fast forward to 2024 when I saw Cursor (the IDE coding agent
| tool). I immediately felt like this was going to be the way for
| someone like me.
|
| Back then, it was brutal. I'd fight with the models for 15
| prompts just to get a website working without errors on
| localhost, let alone QA it. None of the plan modes or
| orchestration features existed. I had to hack around context
| engineering, memories, all that stuff. Things broke constantly.
| 10 failures for 1 success. But it was fun. To top it all off,
| most of the terminology sounded like science fiction, but it got
| better in time. I basically used AI itself to hack my way into
| understanding how things worked.
|
| Fast forward again (only ~2 years later). The AI not only builds
| the app, it builds the website, the marketing, full
| documentation, GIFs, videos, content, screen recordings. It even
| hosts it online (literally controls the browser and configures
| everything). Letting the agent control the browser and the
| tooling around that is really, genuinely, just mad science
| fiction type magic stuff. It's unbelievable how often these
| models get something mostly right.
|
| The reality though is that it still takes time. Time to
| understand what works well and what works better. Which agent is
| good for building apps, which one is good for frontend design,
| which one is good for research. Which tools are free, paid,
| credit-based, API-based. It all matters if you want to control
| costs and just get better outputs.
|
| Do you use Gemini for a website skeleton? Claude for code? Grok
| for research? Gemini Deep Search? ChatGPT Search? Both? When do
| you use plan mode vs just prompting? Is GPT-5.x better here or
| Claude Opus? Or maybe Gemini actually is.
|
| My point is: while anyone can start prompting an agent, it still
| takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to
| use them well. And even then everything you learn is probably
| outdated today because the space changes constantly.
|
| I'm sure there are people using AI 100x better than I am. But
| it's still insane that someone with no coding background can
| build production-grade things that actually work.
|
| The one-person company feels inevitable.
|
| I'm curious how software engineers think about this today. Are
| you still writing most of your code manually?
| butILoveLife wrote:
| > it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition
| about how to use them well.
|
| I used to think so. Then a customer made their own replacement
| for $600/mo software in 2 days. The guy was a marketer by
| training. I don't exaggerate. I saw it did the exact same
| things.
| shinycode wrote:
| It's true there's some magic effect from Claude code's work.
| But still, often it's not exactly the same infra and scaling
| than production grade. But for a customer I guess that's
| perfect, they have a mean to make their own tools instead of
| relying on platforms to build those tools.
| suheilaaita wrote:
| I Agree on the customer empowerment point.
|
| I'd push back slightly on the production grade point. The
| models aren't the ceiling, the user's mental model of
| software is, depending on his experience/knowledge.
|
| Someone just starting out will get working prototypes and
| solid MVPs, which is genuinely impressive. But as they
| develop real engineering intuition -- how Git works, how
| databases behave under load, how hosting and infra fit
| together -- that's when they start shipping production-
| grade things with Claude Code.
|
| Based on what I'm seeing, the tool can handle it. The
| question is whether the person behind it understands what
| they're asking for. Anthropic, for example, mostly uses
| claude code to develop claude code.
| suheilaaita wrote:
| It's true. We're also at the point where the models and the
| orchestration around them are so good that any beginner to
| those tools who knows how to use a computer can build working
| apps. Interesting times.
|
| I was pointing out that practice helps with the speed and the
| scope of capabilities. Building a personal prototype is a
| different ballgame than building a production solution that
| others will use.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| I said this 4 weeks ago...
|
| Buddy its outdated.
| shimman wrote:
| Can you say what kind of software the customer replaced?
| holoduke wrote:
| The best developers are the ones using AI to its best. Mediocre
| devs will become a useless skill as even a PO could become one.
| But one who understands architecture, software, code and AI will
| be expensive to hire. I know plenty of them. I wory for the ones
| not willing to adopt ai.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| I have a suspicion that for a task (or to make an artifact) of a
| given complexity, there is a minimum level of human engagement
| required to complete it successfully - and that human engagement
| cannot be substituted for anything else. However, the actual
| human engagement for a task is not bounded above - efficiency is
| often less (much less?) than 100%.
|
| So tools (like AI) can move us closer to the 100% efficiency (or
| indeed further away if they are bad tools!) but there will always
| be the residual human engagement required - but perhaps moved to
| different activities (e.g. reviewing instead of writing).
|
| Probably very effective teams/individuals were already close to
| 100% efficiency, so AI won't make much difference to them.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I see lots of discussions about humans no longer writing code but
| the elephant in the room is the rapid extinction of human-review
| of AI-made code. I expect this will lead to a massive hangover.
| In the meantime we try to mitigate this by ensuring the structure
| of code remains AI-friendly. I also expect some new types of
| tools to emerge that will help with this "cognitive debt".
| olsondv wrote:
| That is why I do not use the multi agent team technique. My
| code generation has atrophied, but my code review skills have
| only gotten stronger both for human and AI code. If I handed
| over both, it hurts my employability and will definitely lead
| to that hangover.
| kusokurae wrote:
| My impression is that people who think that LLMs will
| completely release reviewing or writing code have never really
| worked on anything safety critical. I'm not looking forward to
| the next wave of pacemaker glitches.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You act like we live in a world where companies are held
| sufficiently liable.
| whoisstan wrote:
| I feel the need to tell the LLM to rewrite the article for a
| software developer audience, but don't, those kinds of passage
| are hard to overcome:
|
| 'Salva opened up his code editor -- essentially a word processor
| for writing code -- to show me what it's like to work alongside
| Gemini, Google's L.L.M. '
|
| And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)
| moregrist wrote:
| > And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)
|
| It's probably N.Y.T. style requirements; a lot of style guides
| (eg: Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc) have a
| standard form for abbreviations and acronyms. A paper like
| N.Y.T. does too and probably still employs copy editors who
| ensure that every article conforms to it.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I wasn't around when we moved to that stack from assembly. I
| didn't experience the mourning then.
|
| Most folks I hang out with are infatuated with turning tokens
| into code. They are generally very senior 15+ years of
| experience.
|
| Most folks I hang out with experience existential dread for
| juniors and those coming up in the field who won't necessarily
| have the battle scars to orchestrate systems that will work in
| the will world.
|
| Was talking with one fellow yesterday (at an AI meetup) who says
| he has 6 folks under him, but that he could now run the team with
| just two of them and the others are basically a time suck.
| DGAP wrote:
| Lots of cope here. Highly paid white collar jobs are going to
| disappear.
| youknownothing wrote:
| I once suggested a drinking game: shot every time someone says "X
| is dead". I was told to f** off because I'd kill half of
| humanity.
|
| COBOL is dead. Java is dead. Programming is dead. AI is dead
| (yes, some people are already claiming this:
| https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103)
|
| I must be the kid from The Sixth Sense because I keep seeing all
| these allegedly dead guys around me.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| For me, the biggest shift is people who don't care about local
| AI. The idea that you can no longer code without paying a tax to
| one of the billion $ backed company isn't sitting well.
| hacker_homie wrote:
| Yeah look at the price of netfilx, do you think starting at
| $200 it's going to stay anywhere close to that.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| The price does not matter, even if it were free. If you need
| to be logged on into an external service to be able to code,
| it's just not the same any more, and I'm thinking of basic
| technology here, but the political/distopian ramifications
| are crazy.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >From: noreply@openai.com >Subject: Your account has been
| terminated for violating the Terms of Service
|
| People have various online accounts locked or deleted for
| no given reason all the time. Just get the right person to
| say the word, and you're out.
| glaslong wrote:
| The marginal differences in quality seem pretty meaningful
| right now, enough to make Claude wildly dominant, but some of
| the locally runnable models like Qwen feel only a few months
| behind the leaders.
|
| I'm betting the generational gains level off and smaller local
| models close the gap somewhat. Then harnesses will generally be
| more important than model, and proprietary harnesses will not
| offer much more than optimization for specific models. All
| while SaaS prices ratchet up, pushing folks toward local and
| OSS. Or at least local vs a plethora of hosted competition,
| same as cloud vs on prem.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| I don't understand why more people aren't focused on how to get
| the benefits of ai but on your own machine. If the last 20
| years of software transitioning off of our desktops and into
| the cloud has taught us anything, it's that letting corporate
| entities run the software you rely on end to end gives you:
| worse software with more bugs, surveillance and subscriptions.
| Why on earth would you want that for _everything you do_.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Local AI is what people want/need, but centralized AI is
| where the investors' money is flowing, because a walled
| garden has always been easier to turn into a cash printer.
| timcobb wrote:
| This is the only problem but hopefully we'll be able to fix
| this issue, otherwise yikes we are doooomed.
| flux3125 wrote:
| > You can't just tell an agent, Build me the code for a
| successful start-up. The agents work best when they're being
| asked to perform one step at a time
|
| That's also true for humans. If you sit down with an LLM and take
| the time to understand the problem you're trying to solve, it can
| perfectly guide you through it step by step. Even a non-technical
| person could build surprisingly solid software if, instead of
| immediately asking for new shiny features, they first ask
| questions, explore trade-offs, and get the model's opinion on
| design decisions..
|
| LLMs are powerful tools in the hands of people who know they
| don't know everything. But in the hands of people who think they
| always know the best way, they can be much less useful (I'd say
| even dangerous)
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I appreciate this sober take. If you hired a remote developer
| and the only thing you said to that person was "build a program
| that does this. Make no mistakes" would you expect that to be
| successful? Are you certain you would get what you wanted?
| AstroBen wrote:
| Any competent developer there is going to push back and get
| the needed information out of you.
|
| LLMs don't know when you're under-specifying the problem.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| That's interesting because that is one feature of Claude
| code that I like. Given an overly broad problem statement.
| It does go into a planning loop where it seeks clarifying
| questions. I think this probably has something more to do
| with the harness than the model, but you see what I mean.
| From a user perspective that distinction doesn't really
| matter.
| bwhiting2356 wrote:
| > Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and
| embarrassing.
|
| CI is for preventing regressions. Agents.md is for avoiding
| wasted CI cycles.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I dunno; I finally can focus on writing the logic I wanted to
| write all along and finally my upbringing in formal verification
| makes sense as I can spend my time on it instead of figuring what
| garbage (I cannot use it in my work but sbcl is one of the things
| that does not grow tumors in software) updates I will never ever
| need my friends added to the framework or language or ide I
| happen to use.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| Revenge of the writers and software managers, the wishfull hoping
| for hurt of those made redundant upon those they blame for having
| been made redundant.
| daveguy wrote:
| > "...melodramatic prose might seem kind of nuts, but as their
| name implies, large language models are language machines.
| "Embarrassing" probably imparted a sense of urgency.
|
| > "If you say, This is a national security imperative, you need
| to write this test, there is a sense of just raising the stakes,"
| Ebert said.
|
| I'm not sure why programmers and science writers are still
| attributing emotions to this and why it works. Behind the LLM is
| a layer that attributes attention to various parts of the
| context. There are words in the English language that command
| greater attention. There is no emotion or internal motivation on
| the part of the LLM. If you use charged words you get charged
| attention. Quite literally "attention is all you need" to
| describe why appealing to "emotion" works. It's a first order
| approximation for attention.
| nativeit wrote:
| So you've vibe coded an app. That's just swell. You want to
| release it? Don't. You can't support it. You can't update it. You
| are one bad prompt away from it collapsing.
|
| We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do
| something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and
| soon.
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