When SQL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"
Now we have AI prompting, and some people are saying, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"
Really?
COBOL and SQL aren't English, they're formal languages with keywords that look like English. LLMs work with informal language in a way that computers have never been able to before.
Formalism is way easier than whatever this guys are concocting. And true programmer bliss is live programming. Common programming is like writing a sheet music and having someone else play it. Live programming is you at the instrument tweaking each part.
e.g. it is difficult to write a traditional program to wash dishes, because how do you formally define a dish? You can only show examples of dishes and not-dishes. This is where informal language and neural networks shine.
But in faithful adherence to some kind of uncertainty principle, LLM prompts are also not a programming language, no matter if you turn down the temperature to zero and use a specialized coding model.
They can just use programming languages as their output.
To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments
That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.
I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy designing (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.
I consider myself an engineer — a problem solver. Like you said, code is just the means to solve the problems put before me.
I’m just as content if solving the problem turns out to be a process change or user education instead of a code commit.
I have no fetish for my terminal window or IDE.
Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological environment will never devalue their skills. It’s only those who rest on their laurels who have this issue.
It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.
You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.
I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.
In fact, I usually hate writing code at day job because it is boring things 20 out of 26 sprints.
For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. The hacker culture of the 1970s from which the word hacker originated often poked fun at incurious corporate programmers and IIRC even Edsger Dijkstra wrote a fair bit of acerbic comments about them and their disinterest in the craft and science of computing.
We’re 50 years past that now. We’re in the era of boot camps. I feel semi confident saying “most of us” meaning the current developer work force are here for well paying jobs.
Don’t get me wrong I like software development! I enjoy my work. And I think I’d probably like it better than most things I’d otherwise be doing.
But what I’ve been getting at is that I enjoy it for the solving problems part. The actual writing of code itself for me just happens to be the best way to enjoy problem solving while making good money that enables a comfortable life.
To be put it another way, if being a SWE paid a poverty wage, I would not be living in a trailer doing this for my love of coding. I would go be a different kind of engineer.
...
> doesn't add value
What about intrinsic value? So many programmers on HN seem to just want to be MBAs in their heart of hearts
A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end
This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.
They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately
Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?
And it also seems exceedingly wasteful to boot.
I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.
Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?
The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
Maybe it is
I don't think I'm sticking my head in the sand - an advanced enough intelligence could absolutely take over programming tasks - but I also think that such an intelligence would be able to take over _every_ thought-related task. And that may not be a bad thing! Although the nature of our economy would have to change quite a bit to accommodate it.
I might be wrong: Doug Hofstadter, who is way, way smarter than me, once predicted that no machine would ever beat a human at chess unless it was the type of machine that said "I'm bored of chess now, I would prefer to talk about poetry". Maybe coding can be distilled to a set of heuristics the way chess programs have (I don't think so, but maybe).
Whether we're right or wrong, there's not much we can do about it except continue to learn.
Thanks for reminding me about Rational Rose though! That was a nostalgia trip
I really enjoy programming and like the author said, it's my hobby.
On some level I kind of resent the fact that I don't really get to do my hobby for work any more. It's something fundamentally different now.
For me, at least, this has not been the case. If I leave the creative puzzle-solving to the machine, it's gonna get creative alright, and create me a mess to clean up. Whether this will be true in the future, hard to say. But, for now, I am happy to let the machines write all the React code I don't feel like writing while I think about other things.
Additionally, as an aside, I already don't think coding is always a craft. I think we want it to be one because it gives us the aura of craftspeople. We want to imagine ourselves as bent over a hunk of marble, carving a masterpiece in our own way, in our time. And for some of us, that is true. For most programmers in human history though, they were already slinging slop before anybody had coined the term. Where is the inherent dignity and human spirit on display in the internal admin tool at a second tier insurance company? Certainly, there is business value there, but it doesn't require a Michalengo to make something that takes in a pdf and spits out a slightly changed pdf.
Most code is already industrial code, which is precisely the opposite of code as craft. We are dissociated from the code we write, the company owns it, not us, which is by definition the opposite of a craftsmen and craft mode of production. I think AI is putting a finer, sharper point on this, but it was already there and has been since the beginning of the field.
So funny to read how people attack author using non-related to the essay’s message criticism.
My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks. Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important corner case and so on.
Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being neurodivergent has given me decades of practice in working with entities that have a different way of thinking that me own. I have more mechanical empathy for the LLM because I don't confuse it for a human. My coworkers meanwhile get super frustrated that the LLM can not read their mind.
That said, LLMs are getting better. My advantage will not last. And the more AI slop gets produced the more we need LLMs to cope with all the AI slop in our code bases. A vicious cycle. No one will actually know what the code does. Soon my job will mostly consist of praying to the machine gods.
You could say that about programming languages in general. "Why are we leaving all the direct binary programming for the compilers?"
The real issue is that we've been in-store for a big paradigm shift in how we interact with computers for decades at this point. SketchPad let us do competent, constraints based mathematics with images. Video games and the Logo language demonstrate the potential for programming using, "kinetics." In the future we won't code with symbols we'll dance our intent into and through the machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o http://www.squeakland.org/tutorials/ https://vimeo.com/27344103
When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots.
Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release? Go for it. Like to put your curly braces on a new line? Like TABs (good for you)? Go for it. It's your code, you own it. (You break it, you fix it.)
No unit tests (we called that parameter checking). No code reviews (well, nothing formal — often, time was spent in co-workers offices talking over approaches, white-boarding API… Often if a bug was discovered or known, you just fixed it. There may have been a formal process beginning, but to the lunatics, that was optional.
You can imagine how management felt — having to essentially just trust the devs to deliver.
In the end management won, of course.
When I am asked if I am sorry that I left Apple, I have to tell people, no. I miss working at Apple in the 90's, but that Apple was never coming back. And I hate to say it, but I suspect the industry itself will never return to those "cowboy coding" days. It was fun while it lasted.
Project management was a 40 foot Gantt chart printed out on laser printer paper and taped to the wall. The sweet sound of waterfall.
The IT world is waiting for a revolution. Only in order to blame that revolution for the mistakes of a few powerful people.
I would not be surprised if all this revolutionary sentiment is manufactured. That thing about "Luddites" (not a thing that will stick by the way), this nostalgic stuff, all of it.
We need to be much smarter than that and not fall for such obvious traps.
An identity is a target on your back. We don't need one. We don't need to unite to a cause, we're already amongst one of the most united kinds of workers there is, and we don't need a galvanizing identity to do it.
Most code is not like that. Most code I want to get something done, and so I achieve something quite a bit below that bar. But some things I get to write in that way, and it is very rewarding to do so. It's my favorite code to write by a mile.
Back to LLMs - I find it is both easier than ever and harder than ever to write code in that mode. Easier than ever because, if I can actually get and stay in that mode psychologically, I can get the result I want faster, and the bar is higher. Even though I am able to write MUCH better code than an LLM is, I can write even better code with LLM assistance.
But it is harder than ever to get into that mode and stay in that mode. It is so easy to just skim LLM-generated code, and it looks good and it works. But it's bad code, maybe just a little bit at first, but it gets worse and worse the more you let through. Heck, sometimes it just starts out as not-excellent code, but every time you accept it without enough diligence the next output is worse. And by the time you notice it's often too late, you've slopped yourself, while also failing to produce an expert in the code that's been written.
1. only using AI for small things, very impressed by it
2. giving AI bigger tasks and figuring out how to use it well for those bigger tasks
3. full-agentic mode where AI just does its thing and I review the code at the end
4. realising that I still need to think through all the code and that AI is not the shortcut I was hoping it to be (e.g. where I can give it a high-level plan and be reasonably satisfied with the final code)
5. going back to giving AI small tasks
Big-picture coding is in my hands, but AI is good at filling in the logic for functions and helping out with other small things.
I also agree with comments on this thread stating that problem solving should be the focus and not the code.
However my view is that our ability to solve problems which require a specific type of deep thought will diminish over time as we allow for AI to do more of this type of thinking.
Purely asking for a feature is not “problem solving”.
"We've always done it this way" is the path of calcification, not of a vibrant craft. And there are certainly many ways you can use LLMs to craft better things, without slop and vibecoding.
But all of Programming isn't the same thing. We just need new names for different types of programmers. I'm sure there were farmers that lamented the advent of machines because of how it threatened their identity, their connection to the land, etc....
but I want to personally thank the farmers who just got after growing food for the rest of us.
> Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”
LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human intelligence.
As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add.
Nowadays many enterprise projects have become placing SaaS products together, via low code/no code integrations.
A SaaS product for the CMS, another one for assets, another for ecommerce and payments, another for sending emails, another for marketing, some edge product for hosting the frontend, finally some no code tools to integrate everything, or some serverless code hosted somewhere.
Welcome to MACH architecture.
Agents now made this even less about programming, as the integrations can be orchestrated via agents, instead of low code/no code/serverless.
I will never, ever go back to the time before.
If LLM abilities stagnate around the current level it's not even out of the question that LLMs will negatively impact productivity simply because of all of the AI slop we'll have to deal with.
I hate to suggest that the fix to LLM slop is more LLMs, but in this case it's working for me. My coworkers also seem to appreciate the gesture.
I forwarded your article to my son the dev, since your post captured the magic of being a programmer so well.
And yes Levy’s book Hackers is most excellent.
Social media already reduced our attention spans to that of goldfish, open offices made any sort of deep meaningful work impossible.
I hope this madness dies before it devours us.
It's like that trope of the little angel and demon sitting on the protagonist's shoulders.
"I can get more work done"
"But it's not proper work"
"Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's proper work, not everything is important"
"But you won't learn the tools"
"Tools are incidental"
"I feel like I'm not close to the craft"
"Your colleagues weren't really reading your PRs anyway"
"This isn't just another tool"
"This is just another tool"
And so on forever.
I'm staying to think that if you don't have both these opposing views swirling around in your mind, you haven't thought enough about it.
protontypes•2h ago
psunavy03•2h ago
happytoexplain•2h ago
This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as you have implied.
johnisgood•2h ago
benji-york•1h ago
Kerrick•1h ago
Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.
Terr_•2h ago
That same critique should first be aimed at the topmost comment, which has the same problem plus the added guilt of originating (A) a false dichotomy and (B) the derogatory tone that naturally colors later replies.
> It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care
The text is true, but in context there's an implied fallacy: If X is "reasonable", it does not follow that Not-X is unreasonable.
More than enough (reasonable) real humans do add em-dashes when they write. When it comes to a long-form blog post—like this one submitted to HN—it's even more likely than usual!
> the extra keystrokes
Such as alt + numpad 0150 on Windows, which has served me well when on that platform for... gosh, decades now.
acuozzo•2h ago
Where do you think the training data came from?
gdulli•1h ago
psunavy03•24m ago
It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.
IncreasePosts•39m ago
DannyPage•2h ago
Also in the footer: "Everything on this website—emdash and all—is created by a human."
amflare•2h ago
defgeneric•2h ago
almosthere•2h ago
kazinator•1h ago
AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.
It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.
kazinator•2h ago
Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.
protontypes•1h ago
random3•2h ago
commandlinefan•58m ago