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I wonder over the long term how programmers are going to maintain the proficiency to read and edit the code that the LLM produces.
by CTDOCodebases 8mo ago
I wonder over the long term how programmers are going to maintain the proficiency to read and edit the code that the LLM produces.
- agumonkey 8mo agoPersonally I planned to allocate weekly challenges to stay sharp.
- p1esk 8mo agoI don’t read or edit the code my claude code agent produces. That’s its job now. My job is to organize the process and get things done.
- shinycode 8mo agoIn this case why can’t other agents just automate your job completely ? They are capable of that. What do you bring in the process of still doing manual organization ?
- p1esk 8mo agoI still have to tell it what to do, and often how to do it. I manage its external memory and guidelines, and review implementation plans. I’m still heavily involved in software design and test coverage. AI is not capable yet of automating my job completely – I anticipate this will happen within two years, maybe even this year (I’m an ML researcher).
- shinycode 8mo agoDo you mean, from your perspective, within 2 years humans won’t be able to bring anything of value to the equation in management and control ?
- p1esk 8mo agoNo, I mean that my job in its current form – as an ML researcher with a phd and 15 years of experience - will be completely automated within two years.
- fauigerzigerk 8mo agoIf you want a machine (or in fact another human) to do something for you, there are two tasks you cannot delegate to them: a) Specify what you want them to do. b) Check if the result meets your expectations. Does your current job include neither a nor b?
- p1esk 8mo agoA/B happen at different abstractions levels. My abstraction level will be automated. My manager’s level will probably last another year or so.
- fauigerzigerk 8mo agoSo your assumption is that it will ultimately be the users of software themselves who will throw some every day language at an AI and it will reliably generate something that meets those users' intuitive expectations?
- p1esk 8mo agoYes, it will be at least as reliable as an average software engineer at an average company (probably more reliable than that), or at least as reliable as a self-driving car where a user says get me to this address, and the car does it better (statistically) than an average human driver.
- fauigerzigerk 8mo agoI think this could work for some tasks but not for others. We didn't invent formal languages to give commands to computers. We invented them as a tool for thinking and communicating things that are hard to express in natural language. I doubt that we will stop thinking and I doubt that it will ever be efficient to specify tasks purely in terms of natural language. One of my first jobs as a software engineer was for a bank (~30 years ago). This bank manager wasn't a man of many words. He just handed us an Excel sheet as a specification for what he wanted us to implement.
- ath3nd 8mo ago[dead]
- dadandang 8mo agosimonw alert!!!
- elzbardico 8mo agoThere were always many mediocre engineers around, some of them even with fancy titles like "Senior," "Principal", and CTO. We have always survived it, so probably we can also survive mediocre coders not reading the code the LLM generates for them because they are unable to see the problems that they were never able to see in their handwritten code.
- therealdrag0 8mo agoHonestly it’s not that hard. I already coded less and less as part of my job as I get more senior and just didn’t have time, but I was still easy to do code reviews and fix bugs, sit down and whip out a thousand lines in a power session. Once you learn it doesn’t take much practice to maintain it. A lot of traditional coding is very inefficient. With AI it’s like we’re moving from combustion cars to EVs, the energy efficiency is night and day, for doing the same thing. That said, the next generation may struggle, but they’ll find their way.
- ensemblehq 8mo agoIt’s going to be extremely difficult if PR and code reviews do not prune unnecessary functions. From what I’m experiencing now, there’s a lot of additional code that gets generated.
- bitwize 8mo ago"That's the neat part—you don't." Eventually the workflow will be to use the LLM to interpret the LLM-generated codebase.