5 ms·

It's not the end of programming

49 points by boris_m 22d ago

murzynalbinos 22d ago
We've seen this cycle before with high-level languages or IDEs, where the bar for entry drops but the underlying complexity of building reliable systems remains the same.
- archagon 22d ago
  AI is not an abstraction.
_def 22d ago
Well I can't wait until I don't have to hand code at work anymore. I also can't wait until I do something else for work.
- dgellow 22d ago
  What would you be interested doing?
- dingdongditchme 22d ago
  Become a manager? retire? I write code in my work, and enjoy it. I also write less directly because of llm's but get to read more (which I luckily also enjoy, as long as I understand what is going on). I think you made more of a snide comment and deep down you actually enjoy it ;-). I mean, who doesn't like to code. It's awesome. If not, i hope you find something fulfilling sooner rather than later.
  - sdevonoes 22d ago
    I love to write code and solve problems in personal projects. I love to read interesting technical books. I love to learn certain new technologies. I hate doing the same at work. I couldn’t care less about my CEO’s product, nor about our linting tips or dependency management rules. My PO can pretend he’s the owner of the company, my engineer colleagues that we are shipping the next google. I couldn’t care less. I do it because I get paid and because it’s my career. So, it’s not like “you like coding or not”. It has nuances
    - spacechild1 22d ago
      Yes! Personally, I love writing software, but I would never want to do it at a company.
- loloquwowndueo 22d ago
  You don’t have to wait! Quit and go do something else!
charcircuit 22d ago
>It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the invention of the printing press wasn't "the end of drawing by hand". The printing press let you scale copies of something already drawn. That is nothing like what AI is doing here which is making drawing easier. It's more like people now draw by hand using pens and pencils instead of scraping small rocks against bigger rocks. Technically you can still scrape rocks together, but everyone opts for the modern convenience of better tools. >It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the birth of big tech wasn't the beginning of programming. Considering big tech brought programming to the masses arguable big tech did begin programming as a thing people do.
- appseecker 22d ago
  Fair, but won't big tech collapse without the actual people force?
  - charcircuit 22d ago
    No one suggested that a people force would go away.
respectattentio 22d ago
programming has changed and leveled up due to ai it's as big as going from zeros and ones to assembly language
- kuboble 22d ago
  I think the shift is bigger. In the 01->asm revolution you needed people with roughly the same kind of talent, background and education. Just a different specialization. Now, writing software is available to people who would have never been able to learn it before.
  - respectattentio 22d ago
    You have a point! It appears bigger. That's due to the compound effect I guess (more internet users -> more data -> better models -> fast repeat). Even though 01 -> asm was revolutionary, but its loop was not as big and as fast as AI.
draw_down 22d ago
[dead]
mapontosevenths 22d ago
Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same. This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill. A world filled with mountains of terrible code is a world that will reward the very programers who are trying to fight that future today.
- exitb 22d ago
  What value does the broccoli haired nephew provide in that scenario?
  - monegator 22d ago
    endless job opportunities for millenials and older
- owebmaster 22d ago
  > This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program Which is funny because that was the case 25+ years ago. We (the nephews) would create websites using PHP. It was common for 15, 16 years old teenagers to know more about tech than the adults. That's not the case anymore. So this time it might be different.
  - ed_elliott_asc 22d ago
    Luckily the kids this time have lots of different opportunities than just tech, they have crypto, social media, and etc
    - terminalbraid 22d ago
      I can't tell if this is ironic or not.
- 22d ago
sdevonoes 22d ago
If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.
- spicyusername 22d ago
  One thing I keep discovering about the agentic era of programming is that all of the old lessons and bits of wisdom about programming are still valid. They're just 10 to 100x more important now that you can generate 10,000 lines in an hour. e.g. Break your code up into loosely coupled modules, don't have leaky abstractions, don't have huge God files, have good black box end-to-end testing, do the design work before the implementation, do lots of automated testing, have good documentation, etc. Here is another one that was always true, end users only care about the observable behavior of your program. Does it solve the problem in a performant way? Is it reliable? And another one, it was common when you inherited a large code base that was mature and written before you to not have any clue how most of it worked. We have to accept that the art of nudging the text around is just not part of producing code for money anymore.
  - silent_ssh 22d ago
    Agree. Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening (not improving!) with increased usage of LLMs to produce code, it's even more important than before to get the fundamentals solid. I don't mean "fundamentals" as in "easy things in CS", but the mechanisms behind the systems we build (on top of). And, not being fresh out of school and having experience _suffering_ with poorly designed systems / processes is also still an advantage, as that suffering will ultimately let one make more informed design choices.
    - spicyusername 22d ago
      Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening Are we seeing that though? Or do we want to be seeing that?
  - 22d ago
dingdongditchme 22d ago
Many interesting metaphors to find, "it's like the printing press", "it's like IDE's", "it's like going from hardwired programming to assembly language". At the same time it's unlike anything we've seen before. Interesting to see where the journey goes, I am along for the ride.
colado 22d ago
> but I remember a time when we decided when a given technology began and when did it end …when was that?
fnoef 22d ago
People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a by product of a car, a tv, or your fridge. No ordinary folk ever said “I’m going to go a buy WinZip now”. They simply had a variant of WinZip available with whatever computer they bought. There is simply no category of people who are willing to pay for “high quality hand crafted software”, except for perhaps a few ideologically motivated people. Software development “lost” because it was seen as “something that comes for free with a computer”, and not something that people have to actively buy, like they buy TVs, fridges, or paintings.
- marginalia_nu 22d ago
  Printing presses are not typewriters. The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent. Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.
  - deleted 22d ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 22d ago
    One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are. We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts. Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinning jenny, a printing press, the motor car or indeed any other technological invention that scaled production. It is nonsensical by definition. I think a lot of people just dont want to hear that LLMs are a step change and not actually revolutionary. Theres too much invested in them being world changing at this point. Blockchain was the same.
codetiger 22d ago
Typing code by hand is dead I agree. But calling it the end of programming was bit weird though. I use to write a lot of code everyday for more than 2 decades, but now with LLMs, I can get most of my code written by LLMs, and I make sure they write the code that I want to. Same as, when I had to manage a team of juniors.
hypfer 22d ago
I find it interesting just how different the responses to this new tech are. I wonder if there is an inverse correlation between "usage of local models" and "despair", or if I am just making that up. It would make sense, I suppose, given that local models still come with quite the upfront cost. So a lot of people are experiencing LLMs purely through the user-hostile cloud.
- pydry 22d ago
  the technology isnt the problem at all. it's just being used as an thin pretext to devalue and treat devs like shit by the followers of a new executive religion.
brinepot 22d ago
Every time tools got easier we just wrote more software, not less. This will be the same.
- vaylian 22d ago
  And it's probably going to be a lot more inefficient. See the rise of electron-based software.
Madmallard 22d ago
The fact that we had "The End of Programming" then "No one wants artisanal code anymore" and now "It's not the end of programming" Getting a really really artificial vibe about the content being pushed to this website :/ Making me feel less motivated to even come here to be honest
wouldbecouldbe 22d ago
We a have a decade of Government software to clean up, so we are good for a while
- chrisjj 22d ago
  And the bot will dump on us another decade's worth - just 10x quicker.
ricardo81 22d ago
Script kiddies aren't really a problem, but there's a place where technically competent CTO types can sooner/inexpensively solve problems with AI rather than documenting what they want done.
whattheheckheck 22d ago
Now we get to program people (and program ourselves) so the business processes are optimally interacting with the ultimate state machine of society
baalimago 22d ago
Programming, much like artisinal chairbuilding, will be demoted to a hobby or niche. Software engineering will remain.
shevy-java 22d ago
I think AI brings in many problems. It also brings in new functionality for people unable or unwilling to write working programs on their own. My number #1 gripe of AI is that you become dependent on external companies. I am no loner willing to go that route in general, but even less so when it comes to greedy US corporations that constantly abuse mankind. My number #2 gripe is that AI is ... dumb. I am noticing this on youtube. So many fake-videos appearing, and while I in general do not watch them for the most part, they are incredibly deceitful. And ... dumb. It's just a waste of time to watch them, even more so than it is already a waste of time watching videos on youtube (I often have them just for background music in the browser, for music at the least). AI also makes projects less interesting to contribute to. If 99% of the contributions come by AI, why would I want to be bothered to "get involved"? Ruby has this problem right now. Granted, AI is a helper tool, but boy, what a fake it is - Hiroshi Shibata suddenly has perfect english skills, but it is AI slop generated. So I am no longer "interacting" with humans but with the AI slop. That's not worth my time. AI also is very ruthless against programming languages being bad in certain areas. Case in point: documentation. If AI can slop AI spam generate documentation, even if it is not perfect, whereas I need to manually search for ruby documentation while Google has crippled its search engine to become useless, then this is now a huge disadvantage I am at with. Searching for stuff takes time. Ruby is just an example here; you can extend this to many other projects, including non-programming languages. We need better documentation, but oddly enough the documentation is constantly getting worse in the last +5 years or so. AI skynet is cannibalizing us - people don't seem to realise or care. I somewhat gave up on trying to nudge people to seriously improve their documentation, they just don't seem to want to (not all, but most).
juleiie 22d ago
It’s the end of programming in non natural language
kodoman 22d ago
I feel like the article in question was actually saying some like others are expressing here that writing code by hand is over not the other aspects despite the title. I also think the metaphor of drawing is not perfect but a quite good in this comment in that drawing is talking about something that is missed on lots of analysis, drawing is a free form kind of sketching and one can quickly draw something and work things out. I think being able to quickly code something by hand is still valuable and though you can get an llm to write a script sometimes you just want to write it yourself so you know the ins and out of your 100 cloc script.
NichoPaolucci 22d ago
I think that coding by hand is largely not going to occur anymore. What that does to the learning of new developers + the stagnation of old developers? I do not know. I believe that what makes a good developer (a great developer, really) is the ability to do something at the smallest level "perfectly" or close to it. Chaining those tiny building blocks together. Understanding the entire flow of data + logically. Making something as fast as it can be. When you put more and more of those tiny blocks together, things get a little more imperfect - but a fantastic developer can keep them all perfect for a long time. We're jumping way above that level. That small, perfect logic process, that visibility is now completely hidden from us, some of us wouldn't even know how to do it anymore. And juniors of today will never learn to. And maybe they don't need to. Perhaps we will just build "bigger" software so that the level of imperfection becomes less noticeable. Larger systems, more functionality, more security. I think the brain atrophy is going to hit us HARD though. It feels too fast to rip away the one thing that taught us all of this. Building something piece by piece was the way most of us learned. Then you can jump into bigger and bigger projects and your brain creates those pathways. Previous generations had months / years to learn new tooling - and now we threw ALL of the tooling away and said "use this instead". I think good developers will always find a way to learn and grow, but man is it going to take some time, we completely shifted the way the entire industry produces the machine in the matter of 12 months. I still believe that code is the best way to represent a sufficiently complex specification, natural human language feels very ambiguous sometimes, like extra lossy compression (whatever that is worth).
- kodoman 22d ago
  It's really interesting to the vagueness of natural language and the fact that it's actually impossible to express a single concrete meaning in natural language. That is to say their is always a set of possible interpretations one can never simple refer to one single thing and a program in a programming language is always only one thing (I know that you could argue that compiling to different machine code means their is vagueness since it might produce a x86-64 binary or a powerpc binary and the issue of UB but you see my point). I do think that if one simply 'vibe codes' something they can never really understand the program even if they prompted it unless they study the source in detail. In natural language you can only ever point to a set of things that containing a subset of thing(s) you want.
Rhaskins 22d ago
Programming survived assemblers, compilers, and frameworks. AI is just the next layer up.
- archagon 22d ago
  AI is not an abstraction, which should be obvious to anyone who's progressed past programming 101.
bgarbiak 22d ago
The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt. Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone. I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine started an online psychology counseling site. A year ago they would hire a developer. Now, he only needed an LLM. And it’s the whole thing: a booking system, video calls, a website. What’s underneath: he doesn’t know. The only thing that matters to him is that it works. That to me looks like the end of programming.
- kodoman 22d ago
  Can he trust it's secure? Does what about when something goes wrong. Ops issues might come into play and just handing AI agent ssh keys could cause all sorts of issues. Only time will tell though I guess.
- chrisjj 22d ago
  > Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. So, you'll rely on the tech that created buggy code to somehow suddenly create bug-free code?
  - bgarbiak 22d ago
    Isn’t it the same as relying on human developers? Gotchas aside: I’m not saying the end of programming is a good thing. I’m just saying: it’s happening. Unless the LLM tech will suddenly hit any sort of ceiling.
    - chrisjj 21d ago
      Different. You have a wide choice of good human developers.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]
Driftbench 22d ago
The best programmers will use AI to handle tedious parts and focus on the hard problems.
ChrisArchitect 22d ago
Related: The End of Programming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445717
serbuvlad 22d ago
I have resigned to the fact that there be dragons. I can tell you how things are with Sol. With Sol you need to know what you're doing and roughly how you'd implement it by hand yourself in order to use Sol effectively. With Sol you need to look over it's work and generally treat it like a junior (reviewing critical sections yourself, reviewing throwaway code and prototypes only cursorily). With Sol it's usually not profitable to write code yourself. With Sol it's basically never profitable to debug code yourself. With Sol you cannot trust it to auto-deploy stuff without an entire pipeline and guardrails. I have no idea how you will have to work with what comes next.
trashb 22d ago
I suppose the author is pointing at the fact that coding != programming. The term "programming" is wider applicable than just in relation with computers. Though I don't quite agree with the analogy. To me it seems more like the difference between writing with pen & paper or typing, digital vs analog drawing or printing press vs photo copier. There are some significant changes in how to use the tool properly (can't backspace/undo on physical). However the essence of writing a good story is not in the typing/penning it transcends that. At the same time it is true that different individuals may produce better output with one or the other due to personal preferences or adapting a different creative process.

49 points by boris_m 22d ago

We've seen this cycle before with high-level languages or IDEs, where the bar for entry drops but the underlying complexity of building reliable systems remains the same.

archagon 22d ago
AI is not an abstraction.

_def 22d ago

Well I can't wait until I don't have to hand code at work anymore. I also can't wait until I do something else for work.

dgellow 22d ago
What would you be interested doing?
dingdongditchme 22d ago
Become a manager? retire? I write code in my work, and enjoy it. I also write less directly because of llm's but get to read more (which I luckily also enjoy, as long as I understand what is going on). I think you made more of a snide comment and deep down you actually enjoy it ;-). I mean, who doesn't like to code. It's awesome. If not, i hope you find something fulfilling sooner rather than later.
- sdevonoes 22d ago
  I love to write code and solve problems in personal projects. I love to read interesting technical books. I love to learn certain new technologies. I hate doing the same at work. I couldn’t care less about my CEO’s product, nor about our linting tips or dependency management rules. My PO can pretend he’s the owner of the company, my engineer colleagues that we are shipping the next google. I couldn’t care less. I do it because I get paid and because it’s my career. So, it’s not like “you like coding or not”. It has nuances
  - spacechild1 22d ago
    Yes! Personally, I love writing software, but I would never want to do it at a company.
loloquwowndueo 22d ago
You don’t have to wait! Quit and go do something else!

charcircuit 22d ago

>It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the invention of the printing press wasn't "the end of drawing by hand". The printing press let you scale copies of something already drawn. That is nothing like what AI is doing here which is making drawing easier. It's more like people now draw by hand using pens and pencils instead of scraping small rocks against bigger rocks. Technically you can still scrape rocks together, but everyone opts for the modern convenience of better tools. >It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the birth of big tech wasn't the beginning of programming. Considering big tech brought programming to the masses arguable big tech did begin programming as a thing people do.

appseecker 22d ago
Fair, but won't big tech collapse without the actual people force?
- charcircuit 22d ago
  No one suggested that a people force would go away.

respectattentio 22d ago

programming has changed and leveled up due to ai it's as big as going from zeros and ones to assembly language

kuboble 22d ago
I think the shift is bigger. In the 01->asm revolution you needed people with roughly the same kind of talent, background and education. Just a different specialization. Now, writing software is available to people who would have never been able to learn it before.
- respectattentio 22d ago
  You have a point! It appears bigger. That's due to the compound effect I guess (more internet users -> more data -> better models -> fast repeat). Even though 01 -> asm was revolutionary, but its loop was not as big and as fast as AI.

draw_down 22d ago

[dead]

mapontosevenths 22d ago

Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same. This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill. A world filled with mountains of terrible code is a world that will reward the very programers who are trying to fight that future today.

exitb 22d ago
What value does the broccoli haired nephew provide in that scenario?
- monegator 22d ago
  endless job opportunities for millenials and older
owebmaster 22d ago
> This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program Which is funny because that was the case 25+ years ago. We (the nephews) would create websites using PHP. It was common for 15, 16 years old teenagers to know more about tech than the adults. That's not the case anymore. So this time it might be different.
- ed_elliott_asc 22d ago
  Luckily the kids this time have lots of different opportunities than just tech, they have crypto, social media, and etc
  - terminalbraid 22d ago
    I can't tell if this is ironic or not.
22d ago

sdevonoes 22d ago

If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

spicyusername 22d ago
One thing I keep discovering about the agentic era of programming is that all of the old lessons and bits of wisdom about programming are still valid. They're just 10 to 100x more important now that you can generate 10,000 lines in an hour. e.g. Break your code up into loosely coupled modules, don't have leaky abstractions, don't have huge God files, have good black box end-to-end testing, do the design work before the implementation, do lots of automated testing, have good documentation, etc. Here is another one that was always true, end users only care about the observable behavior of your program. Does it solve the problem in a performant way? Is it reliable? And another one, it was common when you inherited a large code base that was mature and written before you to not have any clue how most of it worked. We have to accept that the art of nudging the text around is just not part of producing code for money anymore.
- silent_ssh 22d ago
  Agree. Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening (not improving!) with increased usage of LLMs to produce code, it's even more important than before to get the fundamentals solid. I don't mean "fundamentals" as in "easy things in CS", but the mechanisms behind the systems we build (on top of). And, not being fresh out of school and having experience _suffering_ with poorly designed systems / processes is also still an advantage, as that suffering will ultimately let one make more informed design choices.
  - spicyusername 22d ago
    Now that we're seeing the quality of software we use worsening Are we seeing that though? Or do we want to be seeing that?
- 22d ago

dingdongditchme 22d ago

Many interesting metaphors to find, "it's like the printing press", "it's like IDE's", "it's like going from hardwired programming to assembly language". At the same time it's unlike anything we've seen before. Interesting to see where the journey goes, I am along for the ride.

colado 22d ago

> but I remember a time when we decided when a given technology began and when did it end …when was that?

fnoef 22d ago

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a by product of a car, a tv, or your fridge. No ordinary folk ever said “I’m going to go a buy WinZip now”. They simply had a variant of WinZip available with whatever computer they bought. There is simply no category of people who are willing to pay for “high quality hand crafted software”, except for perhaps a few ideologically motivated people. Software development “lost” because it was seen as “something that comes for free with a computer”, and not something that people have to actively buy, like they buy TVs, fridges, or paintings.

marginalia_nu 22d ago
Printing presses are not typewriters. The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent. Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.
- deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
- pydry 22d ago
  One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are. We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts. Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinning jenny, a printing press, the motor car or indeed any other technological invention that scaled production. It is nonsensical by definition. I think a lot of people just dont want to hear that LLMs are a step change and not actually revolutionary. Theres too much invested in them being world changing at this point. Blockchain was the same.

codetiger 22d ago

Typing code by hand is dead I agree. But calling it the end of programming was bit weird though. I use to write a lot of code everyday for more than 2 decades, but now with LLMs, I can get most of my code written by LLMs, and I make sure they write the code that I want to. Same as, when I had to manage a team of juniors.

hypfer 22d ago

I find it interesting just how different the responses to this new tech are. I wonder if there is an inverse correlation between "usage of local models" and "despair", or if I am just making that up. It would make sense, I suppose, given that local models still come with quite the upfront cost. So a lot of people are experiencing LLMs purely through the user-hostile cloud.

pydry 22d ago
the technology isnt the problem at all. it's just being used as an thin pretext to devalue and treat devs like shit by the followers of a new executive religion.

brinepot 22d ago

Every time tools got easier we just wrote more software, not less. This will be the same.

vaylian 22d ago
And it's probably going to be a lot more inefficient. See the rise of electron-based software.

Madmallard 22d ago

The fact that we had "The End of Programming" then "No one wants artisanal code anymore" and now "It's not the end of programming" Getting a really really artificial vibe about the content being pushed to this website :/ Making me feel less motivated to even come here to be honest

wouldbecouldbe 22d ago

We a have a decade of Government software to clean up, so we are good for a while

chrisjj 22d ago
And the bot will dump on us another decade's worth - just 10x quicker.

ricardo81 22d ago

Script kiddies aren't really a problem, but there's a place where technically competent CTO types can sooner/inexpensively solve problems with AI rather than documenting what they want done.

whattheheckheck 22d ago

Now we get to program people (and program ourselves) so the business processes are optimally interacting with the ultimate state machine of society

baalimago 22d ago

Programming, much like artisinal chairbuilding, will be demoted to a hobby or niche. Software engineering will remain.

shevy-java 22d ago

I think AI brings in many problems. It also brings in new functionality for people unable or unwilling to write working programs on their own. My number #1 gripe of AI is that you become dependent on external companies. I am no loner willing to go that route in general, but even less so when it comes to greedy US corporations that constantly abuse mankind. My number #2 gripe is that AI is ... dumb. I am noticing this on youtube. So many fake-videos appearing, and while I in general do not watch them for the most part, they are incredibly deceitful. And ... dumb. It's just a waste of time to watch them, even more so than it is already a waste of time watching videos on youtube (I often have them just for background music in the browser, for music at the least). AI also makes projects less interesting to contribute to. If 99% of the contributions come by AI, why would I want to be bothered to "get involved"? Ruby has this problem right now. Granted, AI is a helper tool, but boy, what a fake it is - Hiroshi Shibata suddenly has perfect english skills, but it is AI slop generated. So I am no longer "interacting" with humans but with the AI slop. That's not worth my time. AI also is very ruthless against programming languages being bad in certain areas. Case in point: documentation. If AI can slop AI spam generate documentation, even if it is not perfect, whereas I need to manually search for ruby documentation while Google has crippled its search engine to become useless, then this is now a huge disadvantage I am at with. Searching for stuff takes time. Ruby is just an example here; you can extend this to many other projects, including non-programming languages. We need better documentation, but oddly enough the documentation is constantly getting worse in the last +5 years or so. AI skynet is cannibalizing us - people don't seem to realise or care. I somewhat gave up on trying to nudge people to seriously improve their documentation, they just don't seem to want to (not all, but most).

juleiie 22d ago

It’s the end of programming in non natural language

kodoman 22d ago

I feel like the article in question was actually saying some like others are expressing here that writing code by hand is over not the other aspects despite the title. I also think the metaphor of drawing is not perfect but a quite good in this comment in that drawing is talking about something that is missed on lots of analysis, drawing is a free form kind of sketching and one can quickly draw something and work things out. I think being able to quickly code something by hand is still valuable and though you can get an llm to write a script sometimes you just want to write it yourself so you know the ins and out of your 100 cloc script.

NichoPaolucci 22d ago

I think that coding by hand is largely not going to occur anymore. What that does to the learning of new developers + the stagnation of old developers? I do not know. I believe that what makes a good developer (a great developer, really) is the ability to do something at the smallest level "perfectly" or close to it. Chaining those tiny building blocks together. Understanding the entire flow of data + logically. Making something as fast as it can be. When you put more and more of those tiny blocks together, things get a little more imperfect - but a fantastic developer can keep them all perfect for a long time. We're jumping way above that level. That small, perfect logic process, that visibility is now completely hidden from us, some of us wouldn't even know how to do it anymore. And juniors of today will never learn to. And maybe they don't need to. Perhaps we will just build "bigger" software so that the level of imperfection becomes less noticeable. Larger systems, more functionality, more security. I think the brain atrophy is going to hit us HARD though. It feels too fast to rip away the one thing that taught us all of this. Building something piece by piece was the way most of us learned. Then you can jump into bigger and bigger projects and your brain creates those pathways. Previous generations had months / years to learn new tooling - and now we threw ALL of the tooling away and said "use this instead". I think good developers will always find a way to learn and grow, but man is it going to take some time, we completely shifted the way the entire industry produces the machine in the matter of 12 months. I still believe that code is the best way to represent a sufficiently complex specification, natural human language feels very ambiguous sometimes, like extra lossy compression (whatever that is worth).

kodoman 22d ago
It's really interesting to the vagueness of natural language and the fact that it's actually impossible to express a single concrete meaning in natural language. That is to say their is always a set of possible interpretations one can never simple refer to one single thing and a program in a programming language is always only one thing (I know that you could argue that compiling to different machine code means their is vagueness since it might produce a x86-64 binary or a powerpc binary and the issue of UB but you see my point). I do think that if one simply 'vibe codes' something they can never really understand the program even if they prompted it unless they study the source in detail. In natural language you can only ever point to a set of things that containing a subset of thing(s) you want.

Rhaskins 22d ago

Programming survived assemblers, compilers, and frameworks. AI is just the next layer up.

archagon 22d ago
AI is not an abstraction, which should be obvious to anyone who's progressed past programming 101.

bgarbiak 22d ago

The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt. Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone. I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine started an online psychology counseling site. A year ago they would hire a developer. Now, he only needed an LLM. And it’s the whole thing: a booking system, video calls, a website. What’s underneath: he doesn’t know. The only thing that matters to him is that it works. That to me looks like the end of programming.

kodoman 22d ago
Can he trust it's secure? Does what about when something goes wrong. Ops issues might come into play and just handing AI agent ssh keys could cause all sorts of issues. Only time will tell though I guess.
chrisjj 22d ago
> Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. So, you'll rely on the tech that created buggy code to somehow suddenly create bug-free code?
- bgarbiak 22d ago
  Isn’t it the same as relying on human developers? Gotchas aside: I’m not saying the end of programming is a good thing. I’m just saying: it’s happening. Unless the LLM tech will suddenly hit any sort of ceiling.
  - chrisjj 21d ago
    Different. You have a wide choice of good human developers.

deleted 22d ago

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Driftbench 22d ago

The best programmers will use AI to handle tedious parts and focus on the hard problems.

ChrisArchitect 22d ago

Related: The End of Programming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445717

serbuvlad 22d ago

I have resigned to the fact that there be dragons. I can tell you how things are with Sol. With Sol you need to know what you're doing and roughly how you'd implement it by hand yourself in order to use Sol effectively. With Sol you need to look over it's work and generally treat it like a junior (reviewing critical sections yourself, reviewing throwaway code and prototypes only cursorily). With Sol it's usually not profitable to write code yourself. With Sol it's basically never profitable to debug code yourself. With Sol you cannot trust it to auto-deploy stuff without an entire pipeline and guardrails. I have no idea how you will have to work with what comes next.

trashb 22d ago

I suppose the author is pointing at the fact that coding != programming. The term "programming" is wider applicable than just in relation with computers. Though I don't quite agree with the analogy. To me it seems more like the difference between writing with pen & paper or typing, digital vs analog drawing or printing press vs photo copier. There are some significant changes in how to use the tool properly (can't backspace/undo on physical). However the essence of writing a good story is not in the typing/penning it transcends that. At the same time it is true that different individuals may produce better output with one or the other due to personal preferences or adapting a different creative process.