The beginning of programming as we'll know it?
bitsplitting.org
bitsplitting.org
It's being mandated by almost all companies. We're forced to use it, whether it produces good results or not. I can change a one-line code faster than Claude Code can, as long as I understand the code. Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What am I embracing?
What about code that other (human) engineers write? Do you not understand that code too because you didn't write it?
BTW, that guy received an Oscar for coding. Oh, far far have we fallen since those days and how far we have yet to go...
[0]: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
You helped build the company, you should own a proportional part of it.
The issue with the current system is that only the people who provide money, not the people who provide work, get to own the result. Work (and natural resources) is where value comes from. Their money came from work as well but not only their work, they were in a position of power which allowed them to get a larger cut than deserved. Ownership should, by law, be distributed according to the amount and skill level of work.
Then people wouldn't worry about losing their jobs to automation - because they'd keep receiving dividends from the value of their previous work.
If their previous work allowed the company to buy a robot to replace them, great, they now get the revenue from the robot's work while being free to pursue other things in their now free time.
If their previous work allowed an LLM to be trained or rented to replace them, great, they get get the revenue from the LLM's work...
You still don't make sense, mate.
Yes, a better system would be great. Half-baked ideas only stand in its way.
You still get paid a salary, you can still save up or invest it, it's just that money only buys you ownership according to how much work (times * skill) you put in to make that money.
Any system based on market competition in which your scenario realistically happens was probably so degenerate it would end up being replaced (whether democratically or by force). My system, AFAICT, is strictly (in the mathematical sense) better than the current implementation of capitalism, it just has extra precautions against buying power. What it boils down to is you want a perfect system while I am proposing a system that's better than the current state and you reject it based on not being perfect.
BTW a part of your comment is a condescending personal attack which doesn't add to the discussion and is against the guidelines.
See my comment above - you still see AI as a tool because you're only considering what I call "AI" instead of aAI (actual AI).
Imagine Stephen Hawking level genius at every area of expertise, able to think faster than any human and cheaper than minimum wage but unable to interact with the physical world.
That's not a tool you adapt to use, that's a tool the owners of your company replace everyone with, except ironically those roughly minimum wage manual workers.
I think you underestimate how actual AI would change the economy. All white collar jobs gone, not just programmers - customer support, accountants, managers, therapists, teachers, lawyers, engineers, researchers, designers, HR, marketing. All gone. Everything you can do from home - gone. IF your job doesn't involve physical interaction with the world - gone. And even if it does, it's cheaper to strap a camera to someone's forehead and let actual AI tell him what to do.
These people will still need to eat and they are highly competent so they'll try to get into careers which require manual skill, driving the value of those down as well. And that's even before robotics get sufficiently advanced to stop replacing those. Everyone will get fucked except those who own the AI companies.
And that's how you get a revolution.
I've been wading through vast corporate codebases I never wrote and yet had to understand for the past 20 years. This isn't any different, and AI tools help with that understanding. A lot!
The tools and techniques are out there.
Bingo. One quick edit when you already know what needs to be done is trivial, that means nothing. What happens when you have to write a new feature and it will take hundreds of lines of code? Unless you're an elder god of programming, the LLM will lap you easily.
We currently have a tracking code that is deprecated, and stopping it from going out is a one line removal in a switch statement. I have a ticket for it, it’s 1 point, easy.
I’d wager a guess that if I told an LLM “we don’t want the ‘worker-item-click-apply’ event to fire”, I’m going to get a mix of code edits, maybe a new module, and probably a filter at the API call level, because it’s going to be too clever.
> What happens when you have to write a new feature and it will take hundreds of lines of code? Unless you're an elder god of programming, the LLM will lap you easily.
Then I’m going to write hundreds of lines, I’m going to write tests, I’m going to painstakingly compare my work to Figma, and I’m going to do it a lot slower than an LLM. I’m also going to understand the code, inside and out, and when our new engineer hops in to help add a feature or fix a bug, I’ll know where to send them, I’ll be able to explain the code to them, and we will both grow a better understanding of our codebase.
Could an LLM do that, or help? Sure, and I know that it will take a lot of effort and refinement that is just going to be churn.
I'm serious. Your boss comes to you and tells you to use AI, how is that any different from the foreman of an experienced carpentry / framing crew coming up to his old pros and handing them a pneumatic nail gun, and telling them to put down the hammers? You think they didn't complain, these men who pride themselves in being able to drive a nail with fewer swings than others? These men who are super fast and experienced with hammers and took pride in that, even enjoyed their work, do you think they were happy when their boss, some unskilled management bitch, showed that he could drive nails faster than they could just by pulling a trigger? They hated it! And it didn't matter, they had to adapt. Why should programmers be more privileged?
Your boss tells you to use AI because he gave it a task that took you a day to complete and the AI did it in five minutes. Your boss doesn't care about your skill with an obsolete craft, or the art or aesthetic qualities of coding by hand, or even the supposed quality benefits of doing it by hand. None of that matters when the new tool can demonstrably work faster. Your boss sees it himself, then sees you complaining, and he then sees you as an old veteran complaining about the new way of things. Complain all you want, you either learn to keep up or you'll get left behind.
Speed is only a good thing if you’re heading in the correct direction.
I think the road to this is pretty clear now. It’s all about building the harness now such that the AI can write something and get feedback from type checks, automated tests, runtime errors, logs, and other observability tools. The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs.
This type of works seems to be happening as a lot of orchestrator projects that pop up here every once in a while, and I've just been waiting for one with a pipeline 'language' malleable enough to work for me that I can then make generic enough for a big class of solutions. I feel doomed to make my own, but I feel like I should do my due diligence.
Have you ever look at Debian’s package list?
Most CRUD apps are just a step above forms and reports. But there’s a lot of specific processing that requires careful design. The whole system may be tricky to get right as well. But CRUD UI coding was never an issue.
DDD and various other architecture books and talks are not about CRUD.
This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.
Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
Attitude as old as time itself.
Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.
Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).
I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
This is remarkably sloppy for someone who codes. No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence.
Strong opinions, loosely held.
What I’ve seen seems to confirm that opinion, so I’m still holding on to it.
Yes doctor, but enough about my stool.
Most programmers didn't have access to anything so fancy as those, in fact most programmers considered access to a C compiler to be an extravagant flex well into the 80s. By the 90s they were well available and you had a new generation of programmers that started out with C, encountering older programmers who started out writing assembly for their z80s, the latter of whole were constantly sneering at kids going soft.
Starting when I was about 10, I learned BASIC (not a real language, I was constantly told), z80, then C (a "high level" language) for the m68k. I encountered all of the attitudes I know see ITT being thrown at programmers using coding agents. Hell, I would bet money on some of those exact same old farts still lurking IRC channels, occasionally waking up like Rip Van Winkle to grumble about kids taking old ubiquitous technology for granted now.
(Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)
Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.
From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
Since the dice is loaded heavily, this happens quite often. This makes people think that the dice can program.
I'm not a purist on a mountaintop saying tools can't be used effectively during coding. Everyone googles for API parameters, you can just ask ChatGPT how to fix syntax in an unfamiliar language, and you can copy anything you have access to and paste it in, that's all okay. It just isn't what makes you a coder any more than wearing a uniform makes you a cop.
But I think people object to you saying LLMs are not coding. Using them certainly does not help the person using them think the same way making all the decisions while writing the code. But even if LLMs are a Chinese room, if they could produce the same output as a human (given the same goal and information context), they IMO would be coding.
any examples? I'd love to watch how that went
And here Nakamura still reached 4.5:3.5 vs Komodo in 2016 https://www.chess.com/news/view/komodo-beats-nakamura-in-fin...
Hikaru surely has more matches like that, but I don't know if they can be found in chess databases or if they were only streamed on YouTube.
GP was talking about pc+human vs pc
> In comparision, Nakamura had the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less than Stockfish's 3200+ rating), and it ran on a 2008 MacBook. Of course, he also had his 20-plus years of chess knowledge in play.
Isn't this just a new programming language? A higher level language which will require new experts to know how to get the best results out of it? I've seen non-technical people struggle with AI generated code because they don't understand all the little nuances that go into building a simple web app.
The premise is flawed.
Your company has 3 layers: workers - managers - owners. When AI (actual AI, not "AI") takes over, that'll change into 2 layers: AI - owners.
How you're equipped doesn't matter because you're out of the picture. Not economically viable. Irrelevant.
After all they are asking questions. And they are not dumb ass who don’t learn. They are also motivated to learn to adapt to AI.
IMO the best value of humans right now is to provide skills, as fuel of the future. Once we burn up then the new age shall come.
What is often overlooked is that we are not trying to just produce programs, we are trying to produce "systems", which means systems where computers and humans interact beneficially.
In the early days of computers, "System Analyst" was a very cool job-description. I think it will make a comeback with AI.
People do overlook that. Software is written to solve a problem. And it interacts with other software and data from the real world. Everything is in flux. Which is why you need both technical expertise (how things work) and domain knowledge (the purpose of things) to react properly to changes.
Creating such systems is costly (even in the AI edge), which is why businesses delegate parts that are not their core business to someone else.
The most powerful creative tool I've ever been given is my body, including my brain. Yeah, AI is cool, too.
I have not noticed this: people love sharing AI failing in ridiculous ways.
I would like to know how the author concluded that this is the majority opinion.
The core issue is that he doesn't really understand computers, and because he's old, there's no chance he'll learn a new technology, so he's very distrustful towards computers. Not to mention that modern UX is about enshittification, so it does take some skill to navigate the technology, especially mobile - he trips over things that I consider extremely basic like "this is an ad, don't click this".
I have a similar feeling when reading discussions about AI on this website. Most people here refuse to appreciate AI because "back in my days...". Well, the future is here, old man, adapt or perish. Programming using AI is a completely new paradigm that requires completely new approach and new skills. Either you learn them or you'll be left behind, whether you like it or not - back in 2010's all you had to do to get a lucrative software job was to show that you knew how to use google because most people refused that. I suspect that when the dust settles, something similar will happen with AI, and people who know how to extract maximum value from it will be rewarded handsomely.
I myself have feelings like this, as a software engineer by trade.
"We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium.
Yeah no shade to the author, it was a well written piece, but these arguments increasingly seem like a form of self-soothing to me. On current trajectories I don't see how AI won't swallow up the majority of the software development field in ways that completely devalue not just software engineers, but everyone up the stack in software-focused companies, eventually removing the need for most of the companies to even exist.
(Why have a software company employing someone who is an expert at gathering customer requirements to feed to the LLM when the customer can just solve their own problem with an LLM? They'll build the wrong thing the first time... and the fifth time... and maybe the tenth time... but it'll still be way faster for them to iterate their own solution than to interface with another human).
It'll take longer for senior engineers to suffer than juniors, and longer for system architects to suffer than senior engineers, and so on up the chain but I'm just not seeing this magical demarcation line that a lot of people seem to think is going to materialize prior to the rising tide of AI starting to go above their own neck.
And this is likely to all happen very quickly, it was less than a year ago when LLMs were awful at producing code.
For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.
" At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through."
You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why.
We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day.
To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, TODAY*, shortcomings.
TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
> "But for now, real programmers will always win."
"for now ... always", not a good phrasing.