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I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and

I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less). This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.

eventualcomp 2mo ago
Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.
zero-sharp 2mo ago
>I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? I hear this from time to time. But I still write code at my job. I'm not a software engineer and I don't work for a software engineering firm.
my-next-account 2mo ago
I do! A lot of the work I do is not simple CRUD, and I have to think about what's going on. Reading code doesn't do that to the same degree.
- soulofmischief 2mo ago
  Cutting-edge models are capable of much more than generating CRUD apps and understanding the details is orthogonal to whether you wrote the lines yourself or not.
  - my-next-account 2mo ago
    Yeah, I disagree on the latter point by a lot :-). Really, is it truly "orthogonal"? Not really, you will understand the details better by writing them yourself. On your first point, they are pretty good at a lot of stuff, given that they have seen it before. A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before. That sounds super smug, but it's "da tru tru".
    - soulofmischief 2mo ago
      I welcome you to prove this conjecture, otherwise it's just vibes. > A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before I hear this tired point over and over from people who cannot fathom that others who use LLMs successfully could possibly also be working in a specialized domain. Frontier models are excelling at difficult, long-horizon tasks now. I write all sorts of esoteric stuff, and I can confidently hand a frontier model specification for a language it's never even seen before, working in a domain it's never encountered, and likely get good results, provided I have the knowledge and experience to guide the model. The reality is that this "they are only good at things they have 'seen before'" talking point that often gets parroted is vaguely defined and largely based in opinion. Obviously, models perform worse when the input or expected output are out of distribution. But this was much more true a couple years ago than it is today; the gap has closed considerably, and those who are learning to think deeply with these tools will be better positioned than those who arrogantly think that their process cannot be augmented by the most intelligent systems ever created.
      - my-next-account 2mo ago
        This is HN, most of it is vibes. Lol, conjecture, touch grass man. I do PL research, it's not that good at that stuff, do you think I'm not trying using it?
        soulofmischief 2mo ago
        You're claiming that one cannot understand the details of well-documented and well-written code which they did not write themselves, and I'm pushing back asking for proof. We can move on from this though, I'm more interested in where you currently feel they fall short doing PL research. I think the state of frontier models today in this area is a lot better than it was even six months ago and I think there's still room for improvement.
wannabe44 2mo ago
Reading the code will not give you the same mental model as writing it. Sure you can catch some high level issues, but the brain is incentivized to skip over the lines which look like boilerplate. any issue in between boilerplate is going to be unnoticed. The original sin of the programming industry is not valuing expressive notation and expressive programming languages. (I am not talking about map/filter/reduce level party tricks but better metaprogramming and coherent abstractions). No amount of sacrificing tokens for Anthropicus is going to give you the same amount of understanding as writing the program.
bigstrat2003 2mo ago
I do not know anyone competent who stopped writing code. You have to write the code yourself if you want good results, or spend so much time reviewing the clanker that you may as well have written it yourself.

eventualcomp 2mo ago

Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.

zero-sharp 2mo ago

>I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? I hear this from time to time. But I still write code at my job. I'm not a software engineer and I don't work for a software engineering firm.

my-next-account 2mo ago

I do! A lot of the work I do is not simple CRUD, and I have to think about what's going on. Reading code doesn't do that to the same degree.

soulofmischief 2mo ago
Cutting-edge models are capable of much more than generating CRUD apps and understanding the details is orthogonal to whether you wrote the lines yourself or not.
- my-next-account 2mo ago
  Yeah, I disagree on the latter point by a lot :-). Really, is it truly "orthogonal"? Not really, you will understand the details better by writing them yourself. On your first point, they are pretty good at a lot of stuff, given that they have seen it before. A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before. That sounds super smug, but it's "da tru tru".
  - soulofmischief 2mo ago
    I welcome you to prove this conjecture, otherwise it's just vibes. > A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before I hear this tired point over and over from people who cannot fathom that others who use LLMs successfully could possibly also be working in a specialized domain. Frontier models are excelling at difficult, long-horizon tasks now. I write all sorts of esoteric stuff, and I can confidently hand a frontier model specification for a language it's never even seen before, working in a domain it's never encountered, and likely get good results, provided I have the knowledge and experience to guide the model. The reality is that this "they are only good at things they have 'seen before'" talking point that often gets parroted is vaguely defined and largely based in opinion. Obviously, models perform worse when the input or expected output are out of distribution. But this was much more true a couple years ago than it is today; the gap has closed considerably, and those who are learning to think deeply with these tools will be better positioned than those who arrogantly think that their process cannot be augmented by the most intelligent systems ever created.
    - my-next-account 2mo ago
      This is HN, most of it is vibes. Lol, conjecture, touch grass man. I do PL research, it's not that good at that stuff, do you think I'm not trying using it?
      - soulofmischief 2mo ago
        You're claiming that one cannot understand the details of well-documented and well-written code which they did not write themselves, and I'm pushing back asking for proof. We can move on from this though, I'm more interested in where you currently feel they fall short doing PL research. I think the state of frontier models today in this area is a lot better than it was even six months ago and I think there's still room for improvement.

wannabe44 2mo ago

Reading the code will not give you the same mental model as writing it. Sure you can catch some high level issues, but the brain is incentivized to skip over the lines which look like boilerplate. any issue in between boilerplate is going to be unnoticed. The original sin of the programming industry is not valuing expressive notation and expressive programming languages. (I am not talking about map/filter/reduce level party tricks but better metaprogramming and coherent abstractions). No amount of sacrificing tokens for Anthropicus is going to give you the same amount of understanding as writing the program.

bigstrat2003 2mo ago

I do not know anyone competent who stopped writing code. You have to write the code yourself if you want good results, or spend so much time reviewing the clanker that you may as well have written it yourself.