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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I agree with the author since they didn't seem to provide any evidence / argument for why the future is codeless. They did warn me though that I wouldn't be able to understand from my vantage point in Silicon Valley though so maybe other people see the argument? But from my perspective code is only growing without showing signs of abating.

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First off, I agree. I agree that everyone who continually says "programming" is dying and in 5 - 10 years, "AI" will be writing code (or whatever else they can dream up) have no idea what they are taking about.

Programming is definitely going to get easier and I don't doubt that it will become a common skill.

I just doubt this idea that professional programming is a dying art or something. It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.

(Also, I am like 75% sure that it was a sponsored article to advertise for the company named in the article)

I believe that:

> It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.

Is actually due to Labor Supply vs. Labor Demand. I can envision a world where majority of jobs are all replaced by machines (from Baristas to Accountants), and web/software development (among other fields, such as specialized medicine) are some of the last places for people to remain self-sufficient off their own labor. With this over-abundance of supply, employers are capable of being extremely discretionary over their hires, and are able to pay just enough for their human capital to sustain themselves.

I think we are on the same page, but I was genuinely hoping someone could fill in the gaps the author seemed to be hand waving about. Is programming going to become an easier skill? Absolutely. What does that have to do with the means? What evidence do we have that drag and drop interfaces will replace the majority of coding? Why not something like swift playgrounds or some other IDE innovation that make the coding easier but get out of the way to expose the text if need be? Why is that harmful? Why is that not coding anymore?

Programming won't be any easier. It's like claiming that in the future thinking will get easier. I'd claim otherwise: keeping in mind recent trends of "outsourcing" the knowledge many brains just don't have enough building block in working memory to do complicated thinking.

Another SV resident, I can understand given WYSIWYG tools and CMS like WordPress it would "only seem logical" that eventually nobody needs to code and we just magically make things work.

I think the problem with that assumption is that there has been virtually no traction on "just telling the computer what to do" - whether text or voice. There is also the assumption that programming is not getting more difficult. While not everyone is working on "capital E" engineering efforts, it's a bit ridiculous to think that our jobs are getting easier to automate in the wake of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects like Web Assembly pushing browser-based development into interesting, new places.

Just because we made it easy to set up a blog doesn't mean we made it easy to "program with words".

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