It's Not the End of Programming

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

…when was that?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Software engineering will remain.

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

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

It’s the end of programming in non natural language

>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.

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).

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

[dead]