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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

Yes exactly. LLM-assisted coding is just the next layer of abstraction. This has been happening to computer programming for decades. We've always been in search of a way to program in "natural language"

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641382

AI generation isn't an abstraction because you have to wrestle with the nitty-grittys of the output.

And that output is what you retain.

You can't clone someone's repository of nothing but prompts and rebuild from scratch.

Abstraction means that I trust the toolchains so much that I think of the source code as the software, and in the right kind of environment/ecosystem such as open source distros, I can actually ship that to the downstream users as my product.

Abstractions are based on very detailed and rigid logical contracts.

Why would you link to a four month old HN thread with no comments, instead of the link in the HN thread? What does that add other than an extra click?

It's also an abstraction to hire a software engineer and tell them what kind of app you want, but I don't think we can call it "programming" at that point.

Why? I oversee the design and implementation.

That's called product management

If you only specify the product requirements. I still direct code design and review, arguing along the way. If I don't ensure code quality, who will?

You, the product manager. Or product engineer if you prefer.

Which company do you work for that the product managers are opining on the software architecture, data structures, algorithms, and variable names? And what are your software engineers doing while the product managers are doing the aforementioned tasks? Did your company expand the scope of the engineers to subsume product management? Because a person without a technical background can not reliably take on these tasks. But if the engineers are doing all this, who's talking to the customers?

> Which company do you work for that the product managers are opining on the software architecture, data structures, algorithms, and variable names

We are talking about the separation of these roles going away. If you disagree or can't see that happening, that's fine. Nobody gonna waste their time convincing you.

It's not worth arguing with the troll. Obviously opining about a task is not the same job as doing the task. Everyone understands this. It's like saying "my cooking got better when I delegated the implementation to a private chef".

Conversely, the reason agent assisted coding works so well is that all the tooling meant to keep human coders out of trouble, like lint, leak detectors, profiling tools, test harnesses, etc. prevent agents from making errors.

This is in contrast with general purpose agents like Meta Muse that make some amusing and horrifying errors. These kinds of agents don't have the interfaces and guardrails that were built for human coders. They use a lot of ad hoc screen scraping and guessing at what APIs do.

That's also why Apple and Google haven't shipped fully general purpose agents that use their new app tool calling interfaces yet. For example Google only released their Gemini agent that uses AppFunctions to enterprise customers. Presumably because MDM tools can be used to monitor agents' actions.

I feel linters are not that useful now, AI tend to not do that mistakes already. However there are some other issues like how do you architect, if a helper is needed or not, that no linter can flag. Other AI review tools are doing great imo to improve what is already amazing about coding agent.

Imo this is a problematic way of thinking.

I've been doing a lot of devops lately, writing tons of templates, configs, scripts in like 3 programming languages, wrestling with 'cloud-based' constructs - with LLMs ofc.

LLMs make all this work easy, otherwise it'd be borderline impossible.

It's all BS. Hosting a CRUD app should be an executable for the server (written in boring lang/lib of my choice) + an SQLite db. Of course it's a bit more than that, but not by much.

There are wonderful IDEs and tools out there which help humans do the task, and good design keeps the complexity under control.

LLMs on the other hand both are sources of the mess and solutions to it. Without good tooling you'll be much more inclined to reach for an LLM.

> LLMs make all this work easy, otherwise it'd be borderline impossible.

This is exactly it. We all know and envy that guy who can bang out a script on demand that makes any task simple, and we also know we'll never be that guy.

LLMs are superhuman knowledge remixers. And that's exactly what we need to deal with a lot of software development tasks.

Yes, we found it in COBOL.

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