7 ms·

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I can almost anticipate an interjection along the lines of "well we used to build everything with our hands and now we have tools etc, it's just different" but this is an order of magnitude different. This is asking a robot to design and assemble a shed for you, and you never even see the saw, nails, and hammer being used, let alone understand enough about how the different materials interact to get much more than a "vibe" for how much weight the roof might support.

d_watt 1y ago
What do you think the "mistake" is here? It seems like you're pointing out a consequence, not a counter argument.
- efitz 1y ago
  Exactly. What I’ve been saying to my friends for the last couple of months has been, that we’re not going to see coding jobs go away, but we’re going to run into a situation where it’s harder to grow junior engineers into senior engineers because the LLMs will be doing all the work of figuring out why it isn’t working. This will IMO lead to a “COBOL problem” where there are a shortage of people with truly deep understanding of how it all fits together and who can figure out the line of code to tweak to fix that ops problem that’s causing your production outage. I’m not arguing for or against LLMs, just trying to look down the road to consequences. Agentic coding is going to become a daily part of every developer’s workflow; by next year it will be table stakes - as the article said, if you’re not already doing it, you’re standing still: if you’re a 10x developer now, you’ll be a 0.8x developer next year, and if you’re a 1x developer now, without agentic coding you’ll be a 0.1x developer. It’s not hype; it’s just recognition of the dramatic increase in productivity that is happening right now.
- travisjungroth 1y ago
  There’s a really common cognitive fallacy of “the consequences of that are something I don’t like, therefore it’s wrong”. It’s like reductio ad absurdum, but without the logical consequence of the argument being incorrect, just bad. You see it all the time, especially when it comes to predictions. The whole point of this article is coding agents are powerful and the arguments against this are generally weak and ill-informed. Coding agents having a negative impact on skill growth of new developers isn’t a “fundamental mistake” at all.
SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
I suppose the counterargument is, how many experienced programmers today have seen a register or a JMP instruction being used?
- metaltyphoon 1y ago
  I would assume at least the ones that did a formal CS degree would know JMP exists.
- haiku2077 1y ago
  It's pretty common for CS programs to include at least one course with assembly programming. I did a whole class programming controllers in MIPS.
- weikju 1y ago
  Your compiler does not hallucinate registers or JMP instructions
  - osti 1y ago
    I bet they did at one point in time, then they stopped doing that, but still not bug free.
    - weikju 1y ago
      lol are you serious? I bet compilers are less deterministic now than before what with all the CPUs and their speculative executions and who knows what else. But all that stuff is still documented and not made out of thin air randomly…
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Doesn't it? Many compilers offer all sorts of novel optimizations for operations that end up producing the same result with entirely different runtime characteristics than the source code would imply. Going further, turn on gcc fast math and your code with no undefined behavior suddenly has undefined behavior. I'm not much of a user of LLMs for generating code myself, but this particular analogy isn't a great fit. The one redeeming quality is that compiler output is deterministic or at least repeatable, whereas LLMs have some randomness thrown in intentionally. With that said, both can give you unexpected behavior, just in different ways.
Aurornis 1y ago
> I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere Some of the arguments in the article are so bizarre that I can’t believe they’re anything other than engagement bait. Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows? Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language? I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but it feels like the author decided to go full ragebait/engagement bait mode with the article instead of trying to have a real discussion. It’s weird to see this language on a company blog. I think he knows that he’s ignoring the more complex and nuanced debates about LLMs because that’s not what the article is about. It’s written in inflammatory style that sets up straw man talking points and then sort of knocks them down while giving weird excuses for why certain arguments should be ignored.
- tptacek 1y ago
  They are not engagement bait. That argument, in particular, survived multiple rounds of reviews with friends outside my team who do not fully agree with me about this stuff. It's a deeply sincere, and, I would say for myself, earned take on this. A lot of people are misunderstanding the goal of the post, which is not necessarily to persuade them, but rather to disrupt a static, unproductive equilibrium of uninformed arguments about how this stuff works. The commentary I've read today has to my mind vindicated that premise.
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - emilyst 1y ago
    What really resonated with me was your repeated calls for us at least to be arguing about the same thing, to get on the same page. Everything about LLMs and generative AI is getting so mushed up by people pulling it in several directions at once, marketing clouding the water, and the massive hyperbole on both sides, it's nearly impossible to understand if we're even talking about the same thing!
thewebguyd 1y ago
> get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I wonder this too, as someone who is entirely self-taught, when I started escaping “tutorial hell” was the hardest part of the journey, and took quite a bit of both encouragement and sheer willpower. Not sure I would have ever went beyond that if I had LLMs. I worry for Juniors, and either we’ll need to find a way to mentor them past the vibe coding phase, or we hope that AI gets good enough before we all retire.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
  There will always be people that manage to get into the guts of something. All AI is going to do is create a new class of programmer, such that the people who know the details will end up being more valuable.
mdnahas 1y ago
I wonder if that will make the great generation of human coders. Some of our best writers were the generation that spanned between oral education and mass production of books. Late generations read and wrote, rather than memorized and spoke. I think that was Shakespeare’s genius. Maybe our best coders will be supercharged with AI, and subsequent ones enfeabled by it. Shakespeare was also popular because he was published as books became popular. Others copied him.
hatthew 1y ago
I think the main difference between shortcuts like "compilers" and shortcuts like "LLMs" is determinism. I don't need to know assembly because I use a compiler that is very well specified, often mathematically proven to introduce no errors, and errs on the side of caution unless specifically told otherwise. On the other hand, LLMs are highly nondeterministic. They often produce correct output for simple things, but that's because those things are simple enough that we trust the probability of it being incorrect is implausibly low. But there's no guarantee that they won't get them wrong. For more complicated things, LLMs are terrible and need very well specified guardrails. They will bounce around inside those guardrails until they make something correct, but that's more of a happy accident than a mathematical guarantee. LLMs aren't a level of abstraction, they are an independent entity. They're the equivalent of a junior coder who has no long term memory and thus needs to write everything down and you just have to hope that they don't forget to write something down and hope that some deterministic automated test will catch them if they do forget. If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you?
- red75prime 1y ago
  > If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you? It's clearly a deficiency. And that's why one of the next generations of AIs will have long term memory and online learning. Although even the current generation of the models shows signs of self-correction that somewhat mitigate the "random walk" you've mentioned.
  - hatthew 1y ago
    ok, let me know when that happens
    - red75prime 1y ago
      Don't worry. It would be hard to miss. But, seriously, while it's not an easy task (otherwise we'd have seen it done already), it doesn't seem to be a kind of task that requires a paradigm shift or some fundamental discovery. It's a search in the space of network architectures. Of course, we are talking about something that hasn't been invented yet, so I can't provide ironclad arguments like with, say, fusion power where we know what to do and it's just hard to do. There is circumstantial evidence though. Complex problem solving skills that evolved in different groups of species: homo, corvidae, octopoda. Which points at either existence of multiple solutions to the problem of intelligence or at not that high complexity of a solution. Anyway, with all the resources that are put into the development of AI will see the results (one way or another) soon enough. If long-term memory is not incorporated into AIs in about 5 years, then I'm wrong and it's indeed likely to be a fundamental problem with the current approach.
protocolture 1y ago
>How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? Dunno. Money is probably going to be a huge incentive. I see the same argument everywhere. Like animators getting their start tweening other peoples content. AI is great at tweening and likely to replace farms of juniors. But companies will need seniors to direct animation, so they will either have to pay a lot of money to find them or pay a lot of money to train them.
- p1necone 1y ago
  Expecting commercial entities to engage in long term thinking when they can not do that and reduce costs in the next financial quarter is a fools game. I think what you've said is largely true, but not without a long period of mess in between.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Back in the day I found significant career advancement because something that I haven't been able to identify (lack of on the job training i believe) had removed all the mid level IT talent in my local market. For a while I was able to ask for whatever I wanted because there just was not anyone else available. I had a week where a recruitment agency had an extremely attractive young woman escort me around a tech conference, buying me drinks and dinner and then refer me out to a bespoke MSP for a job interview (which I turned down which is funny) The market did eventually respond but it benefited me greatly. I imagine, this is what it will be like for a decade or so as a trained senior animator. No competition coming up, and plenty of money to be made. Until businesses sort their shit out, which like you say will happen eventually.
- hippari2 1y ago
  Well this is actually happening in Japanese Animation and the result is that no young talents are getting trained in the workforce. [1] But unlike animation, where the demand for the art can just disappear. I don't think the demand for software engineer will disappear. Same thing with musician. Young engineers might just be jobless or on training mode for much longer period of time before they can make actual living money. Good thing is, as far as I know, Kyoto Animation managed to avoid this issue by having in-house training, growing their own talent pools. [1]: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2023/03/31/the-long-quest-to-fix-animes-collapsing-mentorship-the-young-animator-training-project-and-its-legacy-10-years-after-lwa-death-billiards/ https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2023/03/31/the-long-quest-to-fi...
jjfoooo4 1y ago
> How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? LLM's are so-so coders but incredible teachers. Today's students get the benefit of asking copying and pasting a piece of code into an LLM and asking, "How does this work?" There's a lot of young people that will use LLM's to be lazy. There's also a lot that will use them to feed their intellectual curiosity.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Is that what students will do, though? Or will they see the cynical pump and dump and take the shortcuts to get the piece of paper and pass the humiliation ritual of the interview process?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- kweingar 1y ago
  Many of the curious ones will be adversely affected. When you're a college student, the stakes feel so high. You have to pass this class or else you'll have to delay graduation and spend thousands of dollars. You have to get this grade or else you lose your grant or scholarship. You want to absorb knowledge from this project (honestly! you really do) but you really need to spend that time studying for a different class's exam. "I'm not lazy, I'm just overwhelmed!" says the student, and they're not wrong. But it's very easy for "I'm gonna slog through this project" to become "I'm gonna give it a try, then use AI to check my answer" and then "I'm gonna automate the tedious bits that aren't that valuable anyway" and then "Well I'll ask ChatGPT and then read its answer thoroughly and make sure I understand it" and then "I'll copy/paste the output but I get the general idea of what it's doing."
jacob019 1y ago
I'm hearing this fear more frequently, but I do not understand it. Curriculum will adapt. We are a curious and intelligent species. There will be more laypeople building things that used to require deep expertise. A lot of those things will be garbage. Specialists will remain valuable and in demand. The kids will still learn to write loops, use variables, about OOP and functional programming, how to write "hello world," to add styles, to accept input, etc. And they'll probably ask a model for help when they get stuck, and the teacher won't let them use that during a test. The models will be used in many ways, and for many things, but not all things; it will be normal and fine. Developing will be more productive and more fun, with less toil.
Aeolun 1y ago
Feels like coding with and without autocomplete to me. At some point you are still going to need to understand what you are doing, even if your IDE gives you hints about what all the functions do. Sure, it's a different level, but it's still more or less the same thing. I don't think you can expect to learn how to code by only ever using LLMs, just like you can't learn how to code by only ever using intellisense.

d_watt 1y ago

What do you think the "mistake" is here? It seems like you're pointing out a consequence, not a counter argument.

efitz 1y ago
Exactly. What I’ve been saying to my friends for the last couple of months has been, that we’re not going to see coding jobs go away, but we’re going to run into a situation where it’s harder to grow junior engineers into senior engineers because the LLMs will be doing all the work of figuring out why it isn’t working. This will IMO lead to a “COBOL problem” where there are a shortage of people with truly deep understanding of how it all fits together and who can figure out the line of code to tweak to fix that ops problem that’s causing your production outage. I’m not arguing for or against LLMs, just trying to look down the road to consequences. Agentic coding is going to become a daily part of every developer’s workflow; by next year it will be table stakes - as the article said, if you’re not already doing it, you’re standing still: if you’re a 10x developer now, you’ll be a 0.8x developer next year, and if you’re a 1x developer now, without agentic coding you’ll be a 0.1x developer. It’s not hype; it’s just recognition of the dramatic increase in productivity that is happening right now.
travisjungroth 1y ago
There’s a really common cognitive fallacy of “the consequences of that are something I don’t like, therefore it’s wrong”. It’s like reductio ad absurdum, but without the logical consequence of the argument being incorrect, just bad. You see it all the time, especially when it comes to predictions. The whole point of this article is coding agents are powerful and the arguments against this are generally weak and ill-informed. Coding agents having a negative impact on skill growth of new developers isn’t a “fundamental mistake” at all.

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago

I suppose the counterargument is, how many experienced programmers today have seen a register or a JMP instruction being used?

metaltyphoon 1y ago
I would assume at least the ones that did a formal CS degree would know JMP exists.
haiku2077 1y ago
It's pretty common for CS programs to include at least one course with assembly programming. I did a whole class programming controllers in MIPS.
weikju 1y ago
Your compiler does not hallucinate registers or JMP instructions
- osti 1y ago
  I bet they did at one point in time, then they stopped doing that, but still not bug free.
  - weikju 1y ago
    lol are you serious? I bet compilers are less deterministic now than before what with all the CPUs and their speculative executions and who knows what else. But all that stuff is still documented and not made out of thin air randomly…
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Doesn't it? Many compilers offer all sorts of novel optimizations for operations that end up producing the same result with entirely different runtime characteristics than the source code would imply. Going further, turn on gcc fast math and your code with no undefined behavior suddenly has undefined behavior. I'm not much of a user of LLMs for generating code myself, but this particular analogy isn't a great fit. The one redeeming quality is that compiler output is deterministic or at least repeatable, whereas LLMs have some randomness thrown in intentionally. With that said, both can give you unexpected behavior, just in different ways.

Aurornis 1y ago

> I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere Some of the arguments in the article are so bizarre that I can’t believe they’re anything other than engagement bait. Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows? Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language? I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but it feels like the author decided to go full ragebait/engagement bait mode with the article instead of trying to have a real discussion. It’s weird to see this language on a company blog. I think he knows that he’s ignoring the more complex and nuanced debates about LLMs because that’s not what the article is about. It’s written in inflammatory style that sets up straw man talking points and then sort of knocks them down while giving weird excuses for why certain arguments should be ignored.

tptacek 1y ago
They are not engagement bait. That argument, in particular, survived multiple rounds of reviews with friends outside my team who do not fully agree with me about this stuff. It's a deeply sincere, and, I would say for myself, earned take on this. A lot of people are misunderstanding the goal of the post, which is not necessarily to persuade them, but rather to disrupt a static, unproductive equilibrium of uninformed arguments about how this stuff works. The commentary I've read today has to my mind vindicated that premise.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- emilyst 1y ago
  What really resonated with me was your repeated calls for us at least to be arguing about the same thing, to get on the same page. Everything about LLMs and generative AI is getting so mushed up by people pulling it in several directions at once, marketing clouding the water, and the massive hyperbole on both sides, it's nearly impossible to understand if we're even talking about the same thing!

thewebguyd 1y ago

> get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I wonder this too, as someone who is entirely self-taught, when I started escaping “tutorial hell” was the hardest part of the journey, and took quite a bit of both encouragement and sheer willpower. Not sure I would have ever went beyond that if I had LLMs. I worry for Juniors, and either we’ll need to find a way to mentor them past the vibe coding phase, or we hope that AI gets good enough before we all retire.

2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
There will always be people that manage to get into the guts of something. All AI is going to do is create a new class of programmer, such that the people who know the details will end up being more valuable.

mdnahas 1y ago

I wonder if that will make the great generation of human coders. Some of our best writers were the generation that spanned between oral education and mass production of books. Late generations read and wrote, rather than memorized and spoke. I think that was Shakespeare’s genius. Maybe our best coders will be supercharged with AI, and subsequent ones enfeabled by it. Shakespeare was also popular because he was published as books became popular. Others copied him.

hatthew 1y ago

I think the main difference between shortcuts like "compilers" and shortcuts like "LLMs" is determinism. I don't need to know assembly because I use a compiler that is very well specified, often mathematically proven to introduce no errors, and errs on the side of caution unless specifically told otherwise. On the other hand, LLMs are highly nondeterministic. They often produce correct output for simple things, but that's because those things are simple enough that we trust the probability of it being incorrect is implausibly low. But there's no guarantee that they won't get them wrong. For more complicated things, LLMs are terrible and need very well specified guardrails. They will bounce around inside those guardrails until they make something correct, but that's more of a happy accident than a mathematical guarantee. LLMs aren't a level of abstraction, they are an independent entity. They're the equivalent of a junior coder who has no long term memory and thus needs to write everything down and you just have to hope that they don't forget to write something down and hope that some deterministic automated test will catch them if they do forget. If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you?

red75prime 1y ago
> If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you? It's clearly a deficiency. And that's why one of the next generations of AIs will have long term memory and online learning. Although even the current generation of the models shows signs of self-correction that somewhat mitigate the "random walk" you've mentioned.
- hatthew 1y ago
  ok, let me know when that happens
  - red75prime 1y ago
    Don't worry. It would be hard to miss. But, seriously, while it's not an easy task (otherwise we'd have seen it done already), it doesn't seem to be a kind of task that requires a paradigm shift or some fundamental discovery. It's a search in the space of network architectures. Of course, we are talking about something that hasn't been invented yet, so I can't provide ironclad arguments like with, say, fusion power where we know what to do and it's just hard to do. There is circumstantial evidence though. Complex problem solving skills that evolved in different groups of species: homo, corvidae, octopoda. Which points at either existence of multiple solutions to the problem of intelligence or at not that high complexity of a solution. Anyway, with all the resources that are put into the development of AI will see the results (one way or another) soon enough. If long-term memory is not incorporated into AIs in about 5 years, then I'm wrong and it's indeed likely to be a fundamental problem with the current approach.

protocolture 1y ago

>How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? Dunno. Money is probably going to be a huge incentive. I see the same argument everywhere. Like animators getting their start tweening other peoples content. AI is great at tweening and likely to replace farms of juniors. But companies will need seniors to direct animation, so they will either have to pay a lot of money to find them or pay a lot of money to train them.

p1necone 1y ago
Expecting commercial entities to engage in long term thinking when they can not do that and reduce costs in the next financial quarter is a fools game. I think what you've said is largely true, but not without a long period of mess in between.
- protocolture 1y ago
  Back in the day I found significant career advancement because something that I haven't been able to identify (lack of on the job training i believe) had removed all the mid level IT talent in my local market. For a while I was able to ask for whatever I wanted because there just was not anyone else available. I had a week where a recruitment agency had an extremely attractive young woman escort me around a tech conference, buying me drinks and dinner and then refer me out to a bespoke MSP for a job interview (which I turned down which is funny) The market did eventually respond but it benefited me greatly. I imagine, this is what it will be like for a decade or so as a trained senior animator. No competition coming up, and plenty of money to be made. Until businesses sort their shit out, which like you say will happen eventually.
hippari2 1y ago
Well this is actually happening in Japanese Animation and the result is that no young talents are getting trained in the workforce. [1] But unlike animation, where the demand for the art can just disappear. I don't think the demand for software engineer will disappear. Same thing with musician. Young engineers might just be jobless or on training mode for much longer period of time before they can make actual living money. Good thing is, as far as I know, Kyoto Animation managed to avoid this issue by having in-house training, growing their own talent pools. [1]: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2023/03/31/the-long-quest-to-fix-animes-collapsing-mentorship-the-young-animator-training-project-and-its-legacy-10-years-after-lwa-death-billiards/ https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2023/03/31/the-long-quest-to-fi...

jjfoooo4 1y ago

> How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? LLM's are so-so coders but incredible teachers. Today's students get the benefit of asking copying and pasting a piece of code into an LLM and asking, "How does this work?" There's a lot of young people that will use LLM's to be lazy. There's also a lot that will use them to feed their intellectual curiosity.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Is that what students will do, though? Or will they see the cynical pump and dump and take the shortcuts to get the piece of paper and pass the humiliation ritual of the interview process?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
kweingar 1y ago
Many of the curious ones will be adversely affected. When you're a college student, the stakes feel so high. You have to pass this class or else you'll have to delay graduation and spend thousands of dollars. You have to get this grade or else you lose your grant or scholarship. You want to absorb knowledge from this project (honestly! you really do) but you really need to spend that time studying for a different class's exam. "I'm not lazy, I'm just overwhelmed!" says the student, and they're not wrong. But it's very easy for "I'm gonna slog through this project" to become "I'm gonna give it a try, then use AI to check my answer" and then "I'm gonna automate the tedious bits that aren't that valuable anyway" and then "Well I'll ask ChatGPT and then read its answer thoroughly and make sure I understand it" and then "I'll copy/paste the output but I get the general idea of what it's doing."

jacob019 1y ago

I'm hearing this fear more frequently, but I do not understand it. Curriculum will adapt. We are a curious and intelligent species. There will be more laypeople building things that used to require deep expertise. A lot of those things will be garbage. Specialists will remain valuable and in demand. The kids will still learn to write loops, use variables, about OOP and functional programming, how to write "hello world," to add styles, to accept input, etc. And they'll probably ask a model for help when they get stuck, and the teacher won't let them use that during a test. The models will be used in many ways, and for many things, but not all things; it will be normal and fine. Developing will be more productive and more fun, with less toil.

Aeolun 1y ago

Feels like coding with and without autocomplete to me. At some point you are still going to need to understand what you are doing, even if your IDE gives you hints about what all the functions do. Sure, it's a different level, but it's still more or less the same thing. I don't think you can expect to learn how to code by only ever using LLMs, just like you can't learn how to code by only ever using intellisense.