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I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech comp

I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that. Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x. Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out. Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it. And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb. Vibe coding has changed all of this. Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am! Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are. So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
- Balgair 1y ago
  Yeah, just the stats got so bad in the less hard sciences that they released statcheck to help automatically combat it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7540394/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7540394/ Byand large, since bio people just do not like programming, they were commonly generating outright bad code and then spending just months/years trying to figure it all out, hopefully before publication. But not always. LLMs have democratized passable code. I think it'll be before 2030 that they'll have democratized good code.
- wrp 1y ago
  > ...what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it? Cynically, there are plenty of people who don't care so long as they can get it published. Pragmatically, the quality of work is frequently so poor, leading to so much random variation in results, I doubt that frequent errors in AI-produced work would significantly change the quality range in many fields.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  If you think being in IT and supporting random Excel spreadsheets you never knew about and random shadow IT projects that you suddenly get ownership of is a pain. I can't imagine all the vibe coded projects about to come IT's way. With zero standardization on frameworks/DBs/languages used, zero written specs/requirements/anything. It should be fun.
wrp 1y ago
Very well put. I expect the same thing is coming in Linguistics, though at a slower rate because linguists are even more tech/math-phobic than biologists.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are. So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.

Balgair 1y ago
Yeah, just the stats got so bad in the less hard sciences that they released statcheck to help automatically combat it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7540394/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7540394/ Byand large, since bio people just do not like programming, they were commonly generating outright bad code and then spending just months/years trying to figure it all out, hopefully before publication. But not always. LLMs have democratized passable code. I think it'll be before 2030 that they'll have democratized good code.
wrp 1y ago
> ...what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it? Cynically, there are plenty of people who don't care so long as they can get it published. Pragmatically, the quality of work is frequently so poor, leading to so much random variation in results, I doubt that frequent errors in AI-produced work would significantly change the quality range in many fields.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
If you think being in IT and supporting random Excel spreadsheets you never knew about and random shadow IT projects that you suddenly get ownership of is a pain. I can't imagine all the vibe coded projects about to come IT's way. With zero standardization on frameworks/DBs/languages used, zero written specs/requirements/anything. It should be fun.

wrp 1y ago

Very well put. I expect the same thing is coming in Linguistics, though at a slower rate because linguists are even more tech/math-phobic than biologists.