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Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded. Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing every

Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded. Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders. Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating millions of lines of code is also only going to increase the need for professional software engineers. If you're doing an HTML or even React boot camp, I think you'd be right to be a bit concerned about your future. If you're studying algorithms and data structures and engineering best practices, I doubt you have anything to worry about.

skydhash 2y ago
People also forgets that coding is formal logic that describe algorithms to computer which is just a machine. And because it’s formal, it’s rigid and not prone to manipulation. Instead of using LLMs you’d better off studying a book and add some snippets to your editor. What I like about Laravel is their extensive use of generators. They know that part of the code will be boilerplate. The nice thing about Common Lisp is that you can make the language itself generate boilerplate.
- Phurist 2y ago
  You start by talking about apples and finish talking about cars.
  - hackermatic 2y ago
    Could you explain what you mean by that idiom?
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  A way that I like to describe something like this is that code is long form poetry with two intended audiences: your most literally minded friends (machines), and those friends that need and want a full story told with a recognizable beginning/middle/end (your fellow developers, yourself in the future). LLMs and boilerplate generators (and linters and so many other tools) are great about the mechanics of the poetry forms (keeping you to the right "meter", checking your "rhymes" for you, formatting your whitespace around the poem, naming conventions) but for the most part they can't tell your poem's story for you. That's the abstract thing of allegory and metaphor and simile (data structures and the semantics behind names and the significance of architecture structures, etc) that is likely going to remain the unique skill set of good programmers.
api 2y ago
This is what I've been predicting for over a year: AI-assisted programming will increase demand for programmers. It may well change how they do their work though, just like spreadsheets did for accountants and compilers did for the earliest generation of hand-code-in-ASM developers. I can imagine a future where we do most of our coding at an even higher level than today and only dive down into the minutia when the AI isn't good enough or we need to fix/optimize something. The same is true for ASM today-- people rarely touch it unless they need to debug a compiler or (more often) to write something extremely optimized or using some CPU-specific feature. Programming may become more about higher level reasoning than coding lower level algorithms, unless you're doing something really hard or demanding.
- idan 2y ago
  Exactly this. When was the last time you wrote assembler?
- atq2119 2y ago
  A crucial difference to the other examples is this. Compilers and spreadsheets are deterministic and repeatable, and are designed to solve a very specific task correctly. LLMs, certainly in their current form, aren't. This doesn't necessarily contradict what you and GP are writing, but it does give a flavor to it that I expect to be important.
sqeaky 2y ago
I strongly agree with your points and sentiment as far as the state of machine intelligence remains non-general. Currently, LLMs summarize, earlier systems classified, and a new system might do some other narrow piece of intelligence. If system is created that thinks and understands and is creative with philosophy and ideas, that is going to be different. I don't know if that is tomorrow or 100 years from now, but that is going to be very different.
thallavajhula 2y ago
This is such a well written, thoughtful, and succinct comment. It is people like you and input like this that make HN such a wonderful place. Had OP (of the comment you responded to) posted this on Twitter or Reddit, they would probably have been flooded with FUD-filled non-sense. This is what the newcomers need. I've been saying something similar to new Software Engineers over the past couple of years and could never put something in a way you did. Every single sentence is so insightful and to the point. I love it. Thank you so much for this.
mlhpdx 2y ago
Well said. Assistive technology is great when it helps developers write the “right” code and tremendous destructive to company value otherwise.
lelandbatey 2y ago
I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually it stopped being able to make the highly specific changes he needed as he used it more and more. He came to me for some help and I was able to work through it a bit as a friend, but the code quality was bad and I had to say "to really do this, I'd need to consult, and there's probably a better person to hire for that." He's muddling along but is looking for low cost devs to contract with on it now that he's getting value out of it though. And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.
- imiric 2y ago
  > And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do every task an accountant can do, so they augmented their capabilities. Compilers don't have the capability to write code from scratch, and Python doesn't write itself either. But AI will continually improve, and spread to more areas that software engineers were trained on. At first this will seem empowering, as they will aid us in writing small chunks of code, or code that can be easily generated like tests, which they already do. Then this will expand to writing even more code, improving their accuracy, debugging, refactoring, reasoning, and in general, being a better programming assistant for business owners like your friend than any human would. The concerning thing is that this isn't happening on timescales of decades, but years and months. Unlike GP, I don't think software engineers will exist as they do today in a decade or two. Everyone will either need to be a machine learning engineer and directly work with training and tweaking the work of AI, and then, once AI can improve itself, it will become self-sufficient, and humans will only program as a hobby. Humans will likely be forbidden from writing mission critical software in health, government and transport industries. Hardware engineers might be safe for a while after that, but not for long either.
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faeriechangling 2y ago
Hard to know without the benefit of hindsight if a productivity improvement is: 1: An ATM machine - which made banks more profitable, so banks opened up more of them and drew people into the bank with the machines then told them insurance and investments. 2: Online banking - which simply obsoleted the need to go to the bank at all. My inclination that LLMs are the former, not the latter. I think the process of coding is an impediment to software development being financially viable, not job security.

skydhash 2y ago

People also forgets that coding is formal logic that describe algorithms to computer which is just a machine. And because it’s formal, it’s rigid and not prone to manipulation. Instead of using LLMs you’d better off studying a book and add some snippets to your editor. What I like about Laravel is their extensive use of generators. They know that part of the code will be boilerplate. The nice thing about Common Lisp is that you can make the language itself generate boilerplate.

Phurist 2y ago
You start by talking about apples and finish talking about cars.
- hackermatic 2y ago
  Could you explain what you mean by that idiom?
WorldMaker 2y ago
A way that I like to describe something like this is that code is long form poetry with two intended audiences: your most literally minded friends (machines), and those friends that need and want a full story told with a recognizable beginning/middle/end (your fellow developers, yourself in the future). LLMs and boilerplate generators (and linters and so many other tools) are great about the mechanics of the poetry forms (keeping you to the right "meter", checking your "rhymes" for you, formatting your whitespace around the poem, naming conventions) but for the most part they can't tell your poem's story for you. That's the abstract thing of allegory and metaphor and simile (data structures and the semantics behind names and the significance of architecture structures, etc) that is likely going to remain the unique skill set of good programmers.

api 2y ago

This is what I've been predicting for over a year: AI-assisted programming will increase demand for programmers. It may well change how they do their work though, just like spreadsheets did for accountants and compilers did for the earliest generation of hand-code-in-ASM developers. I can imagine a future where we do most of our coding at an even higher level than today and only dive down into the minutia when the AI isn't good enough or we need to fix/optimize something. The same is true for ASM today-- people rarely touch it unless they need to debug a compiler or (more often) to write something extremely optimized or using some CPU-specific feature. Programming may become more about higher level reasoning than coding lower level algorithms, unless you're doing something really hard or demanding.

idan 2y ago
Exactly this. When was the last time you wrote assembler?
atq2119 2y ago
A crucial difference to the other examples is this. Compilers and spreadsheets are deterministic and repeatable, and are designed to solve a very specific task correctly. LLMs, certainly in their current form, aren't. This doesn't necessarily contradict what you and GP are writing, but it does give a flavor to it that I expect to be important.

sqeaky 2y ago

I strongly agree with your points and sentiment as far as the state of machine intelligence remains non-general. Currently, LLMs summarize, earlier systems classified, and a new system might do some other narrow piece of intelligence. If system is created that thinks and understands and is creative with philosophy and ideas, that is going to be different. I don't know if that is tomorrow or 100 years from now, but that is going to be very different.

thallavajhula 2y ago

This is such a well written, thoughtful, and succinct comment. It is people like you and input like this that make HN such a wonderful place. Had OP (of the comment you responded to) posted this on Twitter or Reddit, they would probably have been flooded with FUD-filled non-sense. This is what the newcomers need. I've been saying something similar to new Software Engineers over the past couple of years and could never put something in a way you did. Every single sentence is so insightful and to the point. I love it. Thank you so much for this.

mlhpdx 2y ago

Well said. Assistive technology is great when it helps developers write the “right” code and tremendous destructive to company value otherwise.

lelandbatey 2y ago

I've seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -> calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He'd put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually it stopped being able to make the highly specific changes he needed as he used it more and more. He came to me for some help and I was able to work through it a bit as a friend, but the code quality was bad and I had to say "to really do this, I'd need to consult, and there's probably a better person to hire for that." He's muddling along but is looking for low cost devs to contract with on it now that he's getting value out of it though. And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.

imiric 2y ago
> And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures. Don't you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago. This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn't to do every task an accountant can do, so they augmented their capabilities. Compilers don't have the capability to write code from scratch, and Python doesn't write itself either. But AI will continually improve, and spread to more areas that software engineers were trained on. At first this will seem empowering, as they will aid us in writing small chunks of code, or code that can be easily generated like tests, which they already do. Then this will expand to writing even more code, improving their accuracy, debugging, refactoring, reasoning, and in general, being a better programming assistant for business owners like your friend than any human would. The concerning thing is that this isn't happening on timescales of decades, but years and months. Unlike GP, I don't think software engineers will exist as they do today in a decade or two. Everyone will either need to be a machine learning engineer and directly work with training and tweaking the work of AI, and then, once AI can improve itself, it will become self-sufficient, and humans will only program as a hobby. Humans will likely be forbidden from writing mission critical software in health, government and transport industries. Hardware engineers might be safe for a while after that, but not for long either.

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faeriechangling 2y ago

Hard to know without the benefit of hindsight if a productivity improvement is: 1: An ATM machine - which made banks more profitable, so banks opened up more of them and drew people into the bank with the machines then told them insurance and investments. 2: Online banking - which simply obsoleted the need to go to the bank at all. My inclination that LLMs are the former, not the latter. I think the process of coding is an impediment to software development being financially viable, not job security.