alt Hacker News> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé
Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR was rejected.
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>Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it?
The wont. Instead either AI will improve significantly or (my bet) average code will deteriorate, as AI training increasingly eats AI slop, which includes AI code slop, and devs lose basic competencies and become glorified semi-ignorant managers for AI agents.
CS degree decline through to people just handing in AI work, will further ensure they don't even known the basics after graduating to begin with.
If past patterns are anything to go by, the complexity moves up to a different level of abstraction.
Don't take this as a concrete prediction - I don't know what will happen - but rather an example of the type of thing that might happen:
We might get much better tooling around rigorously proving program properties, and the best jobs in the industry will be around using them to design, specify and test critical systems, while the actual code that's executing is auto-generated. These will continue to be great jobs that require deep expertise and command excellent salaries.
At the same, a huge population of technically-interested-but-not-that-technical workers build casual no-code apps and the stereotypical CRUD developer just goes extinct.