11 ms·

The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

• cjfd 7mo ago
  The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.
  • Havoc 7mo ago
    It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools. What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers
    • ares623 7mo ago
      They can rent their own tools, more like.
      • Kinrany 7mo ago
        No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.
        • ares623 7mo ago
          They can continue renting to maintain the tools they make.
          • just6979 7mo ago
            They _have to_ continue renting, because they didn't learn anything while "making" those tools.
        • matheusmoreira 7mo ago
          One day people will not even be able to own computers anymore. They will be owned, controlled and rented out by corporate elites for limited purposes only. The personal computer will probably either cease to exist due to economic factors. It will probably be made illegal for citizens to own free computers. We'll probably need licenses to operate one. The mere concept of people "making their own tools" is just comical in this bleak timeline.
        • tkiolp4 7mo ago
          Not entirely true. For instance if I use LLMs to build an ios app I still need to pay apple $100 to use my own app for an undetermined amount of time. If I build a web app i still need to pay for a domain, for a server for egress. We are just renting. Wouldn’t be surprised if in the future this gets even more depressing
    • cyanydeez 7mo ago
      The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on a long enough time line.
      • Havoc 7mo ago
        The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level. If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere
        • cyanydeez 7mo ago
          You'd bet that if LLMs were democratizing, they'd be 100's of feet away from it. That they're charging in suggests it can be just as feudal as every other technology. It has no moral value. It's a tool; a butcher can swing an axe in the kitchen as much as in the battlefield.
    • ldng 7mo ago
      Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.
      • kqr 7mo ago
        ... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs. The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
      • edgyquant 7mo ago
        You have to have a knack for it, most people are not programmer types
        • simonw 7mo ago
          I don't think it's about being a "type" so much as choosing what to specialize in. I could learn plumbing skills and do the plumbing around my house. I've chosen not to.
          • sarchertech 7mo ago
            There’s definitely a type. My wife is much smarter and harder working than me, near perfect SAT score, made it through an engineering degree at a much better school than I went to. Then did med school, residency, and fellowship. She’s insanely quick. I once told her about one way hashing and before I was even half way through the explanation. Before I and ever said a thing about what they were used for she stops me and says “oh so that’s why websites can’t just send you your password when you forget it”. At her job she has to call time of death for kids, tell people their kid has cancer, deal with people who literally want her dead, work shifts where she is the one ultimately responsible for the life and death of every patient that walks in the door, and work 7a-4p one day then 10p-7a the next. She can do all that but she says that she hated her Matlab class in college more than anything else and she could absolutely never do my job because she doesn’t have it in her to bang her head against a wall chasing down a bug for an hour that turns out to be a typo.
    • elzbardico 7mo ago
      Programming is probably the most democratized profession ever. The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.
      • analog31 7mo ago
        I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering. It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all. But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition. A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.
        • wiseowise 7mo ago
          This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?
          • braebo 7mo ago
            There will be, code was just a natural first start because it’s just text.
          • zdragnar 7mo ago
            Overly optimistic people are already talking about using LLM based AI as a way to provide healthcare access in underserved (i.e. rural) areas. There's already lots of studies going on for things like using AI to identify tumors and cancers in MRI and other images. There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well. It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.
    • just6979 7mo ago
      Anyone could make their own tools before this as well. Just needed to learn something first. Real democratizing or programming is free access to compilers, SDKs, etc. AI coding does nothing to help that. In fact, it hurts it, because those non-programmers only get access to the AI tools on the terms of the AI companies. Sure they could train their own models, but then we're back to having to learn things.
  • xg15 7mo ago
    It's "democratizing" in the same way Uber "democratized" taxis...
    • Kinrany 7mo ago
      Taxi became more accessible and reliable, didn't it
      • cratermoon 7mo ago
        have you priced an Uber lately?
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • oblio 7mo ago
        For a second, while the hook was sinking in the fish's lip. Now Uber is being "democratized" to billions in profits.
  • tkel 7mo ago
    Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect. Democracy is about governance, not access. A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
    • jasode 7mo ago
      >Democracy is about governance, not access. It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries: https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/democratize#:~:text=make%20(something)%20accessible%20to%20everyone https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:text=relating%2C%20appealing%2C%20or%20available%20to%20the%20broad%20masses%20of%20the%20people%20%3A%20designed%20for%20or%20liked%20by%20most%20people https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
      • mannykannot 7mo ago
        With the consequence that disambiguation may be needed.
    • tbrownaw 7mo ago
      The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have. (Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
      • nextaccountic 7mo ago
        Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services. The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy
  • heliumtera 7mo ago
    You are assuming democracy wasn't designed to crush the individual and reduce autonomy at all cost. How cute.
  • YeGoblynQueenne 7mo ago
    That's a great point but you didn't make your linux machine yourself. A large tech corp made it, and each of its parts. Some of us could probably make their own computers but I don't think I'd be able to make one smaller than the house I live in. There's something to be said about large-scale automation and that's not that it "democratizes" anything. Like you say: quite the opposite.
• bananaflag 7mo ago
  Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous and not cover all the bases. And people are familiar with natural language. And it can fill in the missing details and disambiguate the others. This has been known to be possible for decades, as (simplifying a bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the engineer in natural, ambiguous language what to do and they will do it. Now the AI takes the place of the engineer. Also, I personally never believed before AI that programming will disappear, so the argument that "this has been hyped before" doesn't touch my soul. I have no idea why this is so hard to understand. I'd like people to reply to me in addition to downvoting.
  • danhau 7mo ago
    Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail. How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful when paired with a programmer.
    • cafebabbe 7mo ago
      AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer. Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice. I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.
      • duggan 7mo ago
        Motivated novices will just learn differently, and produce different kinds of systems for different audiences with different expectations. Some will dig into obscurities that LLMs don't or can't touch, others will orchestrate the tools, Gastown-style, into some as-yet-unknown form. People will vibe themselves into a corner and either start learning or flame out.
• ryanjshaw 7mo ago
  Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding. Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe. It won’t be long before AI employees are going to join daily standup and deliver work alongside the team with other users in the org not even realizing or caring that it’s an AI “staff member”. It won’t be much longer after that when they will start to tech lead those same teams.
  • Roark66 7mo ago
    After 2 years of using all of these tools (Claude C, Gemini cli, opencode with all models available) I can tell you it is a huge enabler, but you have to provide these "expert guardrails" by monitoring every single deliverable. For someone who is able to design an end to end system by themselves these tools offer a big time saving, but they come with dangers too. Yesterday I had a mid dev in my team proudly present a Web tool he "wrote" in python (to be run on local host) that runs kubectl in the background and presents things like versions of images running in various namespaces etc. It looked very slick, I can already imagine the product managers asking for it to be put on the network. So what's the problem? For one, no threading whatsoever, no auth, all queries run in a single thread and on and on. A maintenance nightmare waiting to happen. That is a risk of a person that knows something, but not enough building tools by themselves.
    • ryanjshaw 7mo ago
      Yup. I’m not expert so maybe I’m completely off base, but if I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d likely just hire 1000 highly skilled engineers across multiple disciplines, tell them to build something in their domain of expertise, then critique the model’s output, iteratively work on guardrails for a month or two until the model one-shots the problem, and package that into the new release.
      • LiamPowell 7mo ago
• Havoc 7mo ago
  History reviews is not a great way to approach ground breaking tech
  • forgetfreeman 7mo ago
    We have yet to invent ground breaking tech that transcends either human nature or the banal depravity that stems from the profit motive at scale. Prior history of major tech innovations therefore may have some insight to offer regarding expected outcomes of the current hype wave around AI. The notion that technology so cleanly breaks from underlying social paradigms as to be wholly unpredictable is one of the tech industries most persistently naive and destructive mythologies.
  • elcapitan 7mo ago
    "Not learning from history because the present is the present" is a pretty accurate description of the world in 2026, at least.
  • g947o 7mo ago
    You are not going to stop people from reading into history, ever. If anything, people need to learn more about what happened in the past.
• helsinkiandrew 7mo ago
  I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot more about in the late 90's early 00's than now. You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.
  • utopiah 7mo ago
    I'm not familiar with Software Reuse but if it's about re-using software itself one advantage of a live codebase is that it's understood in the head of a human being. That means when an issue is opened, a person remembers if it's a new issue or not. It's not "just" semantic search where that person knows only if it's genuinely new or not (and thus can be closed) but rather why it exists in the first place. Is it the result of the current architecture, dependency choice, etc or rather simply a "shallow" bug that can be resolved with fixing a single function.
  • bluGill 7mo ago
    If you have been in the industry for a few decades you will be able to think of several hundred "silver bullets" that made great promises - some even turned out to be great ideas, but none where the 10x revolution that they promised. The article is a good summary of major movements through the decades without so much that whole point is lost in the details. I would have put in a slightly different set of things if I wanted to write that article, but the point would still stand and I would leave out many things that could be put in but would be too much noise.
    • vladms 7mo ago
      Maybe that's due to Amdahl's law applied to software. Everybody imagines that task X which is improved by 10x is 100% of the total work, so you will get 10x overall benefit, when in fact might be something like 20% of the work, so your overall benefit is only 1.21x .
  • zozbot234 7mo ago
    It's talked about a lot now, too - that's ultimately what is meant by such terms as Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM).
• jleyank 7mo ago
  Developers are “unwanted overhead” until the customer money threatens to walk out the door. They’re going to damage their future products and probably reduce their customer base (fewer consumers) and then sit there looking like gaffed fish when the budget ink turns red. “Who would have thought…” Don’t facilitate losing your job.
  • marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    Funny part is we've already had this exact thing happen with outsourcing. It sure looked like a bargain until you got to such pesky details as correctness and maintainability.
    • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
      I am starting to think it is a part of the management cycle. They new batch feels confident they can do X so they have to re-learn, while inflicting ridiculous amount of pain the process. Two years ago, one former exec at my place was perfectly happy to throw resources ( his word ) from India at a problem, while unwilling to pay the vendor for the same thing. I voiced my objection once, but after it was dismissed I just watched the thing blow up. I am not saying current situation is the same. It is not. But, it is the same hubris, which means miscalculations will happen ( like with Dorsey's Block mass firing ).
      • Bridged7756 7mo ago
        History truly repeats itself. C-suites will forever be the source of stupid decisions in our profession.
        • bluGill 7mo ago
          C-suites are the source of all the important decisions, both the great ones and the stupid ones. The great people in the C-suite have figured out how to get advice from people who are below them and not "yes-men" to tell them what to decide - but right or wrong the buck stops there.
• nsjdjdkdz 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • prsheetraj 7mo ago
    Same phenomena noticed here at IBM Mumbai sir.
• kopirgan 7mo ago
  Wow it mentions practically every flavour of the month technology that was supposed to make it drag and drop to make useful programs I recall Power builder in particular it was the rage.
• manoDev 7mo ago
  There are two ways to look at it: - Software engineering is a cost center, they are middlemen between the C-level ideas and a finished product. - Software engineering is about figuring out how to automate a problem, exploring the domain, defining context, tradeoffs, and unlocking new capabilities in the process
  • nz 7mo ago
    Quasi-relevant excerpt from an odd essay (footnotes and references omitted). ``` My own eyes spent countless nights observing, with curiosity and wonder and delight, the responses of a computer, as I commanded it with code, like a sorcerer casting spells. I could not have known, that this obedient machine, this silicon golem, was also, slowly and imperceptibly, enchanting me, and changing how my eyes would see. At the time^21 , I was a mere fifteen years old, young enough, so that the gravity of life was weak enough, and the mind nimble enough, to allow me to explore without any material justification. The computer was the believed and I was the believer. A consequence of becoming obsessed^22 with computer programming, is that one starts to see new metaphors, algorithmic metaphors, everywhere one looks. This new metaphorical lense, belongs entirely to the third eye. Without this lense, I would look at a traffic jam, and see a traffic jam. With the lense, I would look at a traffic jam, and wonder if, and to what extent, the latency-throughput trade-off^23 was true for highways. Without the lense, I would read about social theory, and simply see the words. With the lense, I would ask if society was, a tree^24 , a graph^25, a tree of graphs, or a graph of trees^26. To generalize, the computer programmer looks at something, and asks, _is this thing an algorithm, and if so, what kind_ ? The entire _trade_ of com-puter programming, it revolves around this question, around the discovery of metaphors that fit^27[13][14]. It is thus little surprise, when a computer programmer asks if (or sometimes asserts that) a certain kind of algorithm^28 is intelligence^29 , consciousness, or both. The entire ritual of computer programming, is similar to the trade, in that it involves discovering metaphors, not as a means to an end, but as their own end. This ritual is difficult to explain to someone who has never practiced it. Imagine, instead of trying to find metaphors that bridge the real to the algorithmic, one tries to find metaphors that bridge the algorithmic to itself. It is very similar to what mathematicians do, but it requires writing programs in a very principled and abstract way^30 . This ritual, unlike the ritual of writing, and unlike the ritual of mathemat-ics, has a dominant material component (the computer) which can make your code, in addition to an _imaginary_ experience, a _material_ experience^31 . This makes the computer a medium — an artificial oracle or artificial hallucinogen — that can safely imagine the unimaginable. And like the oracle, the computer exists to provide insight^32. Without the ritual of programming, there would be no field of chaos the-ory, nor complex systems (very important for economics and environmental sciences), and _certainly_ no elaborate fractals. Pure mathematics could only scratch the surface, because the mathematical ideas, of the mid 20th century, that our imaginations could access, were insufficient for exploring these sys-tems. Computers allow us, not unlike microscopes and telescopes, to magnify the informational dimension of nature [17]. Computers, and the arcane programming languages that make them obey, are magic machines, that created a new interaction between, two elements of the human psychic triad, the immaterial and material. What is this triad, and what is its third element? The concept of the triad appears so frequently, in recorded human thought, and in the structure of language, that it is either some kind of adaptive ideal^33 , or a consequence of language itself^34, if not both. Pythagoras called _three_ perfection itself. Plato divided the world into three parts. And, even today, our modern shamans and sages, use triads to discuss the universe. Roger Penrose has a traid consisting of physical, platonic, and mind. Lacan has a triad consisting of real, symbolic, and imaginary. Plato has a triad of good, truth, and beauty. Of the three, Lacan’s naming is the most self-explanatory. In this essay, the _material_ is the real, and the _immaterial_ is the other two. The _trade_ of programming is driven by the _real_, while the _ritual_ of pro-gramming is driven by the _imaginary_. A trade is pursued because of real, material concerns (such as covering the cost of living), while a ritual is pur-sued because of imaginary concerns — concerns that can, more precisely, be called _aesthetic_. ```
• simonw 7mo ago
  I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • YeGoblynQueenne 7mo ago
    They do. Servers, smartphones, most embedded systems, don't need an "operator" as in the past. Your source was probably thinking of that kind of "programmer".
  • wincy 7mo ago
    In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too! This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!” The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.
    • voxl 7mo ago
      What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python" Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.
• PeterWhittaker 7mo ago
  One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't. Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?
  • simonw 7mo ago
    I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.
    • ryanmcl 7mo ago
      [dead]
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • PeterWhittaker 7mo ago
        Thoroughly insightful take!
      • simonw 7mo ago
        Congratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.
        • falkensmaize 7mo ago
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• shiandow 7mo ago
  LLMs seem quite successful when considered something like a natural langiage interface, but expecting intelligence seems a step too far. For one they do not learn, at least not online, and that is a somewhat important requirement for truly intelligent behaviour. Arguably programming is as much learning as it is writing code. This is part of the reason some people copy an entire API and don't realise they're not so much building useful code as building an understanding.
  • nz 7mo ago
    In some sense, programming is about figuring out which algorithms are a fitting metaphor for business problems. By programming, you are building a model of the business problem and a model of its solution. Most of the non-programmers who are in positions of authority (managers, CEOs, even some CTOs), do not understand that this is what programmers do. From their point of view, the authorities come up with a "strategy", after dozens of meetings, and give the programmers vague instructions based on the strategy, and programmers turn those instructions into code that does something somewhere, usually after finding ways to avoid bad or unfeasible ideas, while still complying with the instructions. To them, an LLM is indistinguishable from a programmer. From the point of view of authority, progress happens one meeting at a time. The reality is that there is a pyramid of experts beneath the authorities, that keep everything running smoothly, in spite of the best attempts of the authorities to demolish the foundation of the pyramid by "helping". EDIT: to end on a positive note, it does not have to be this way. We just have to be willing to understand _how_ the organization we are a part of actually functions. And that means actually being curious instead of merely authoritative. I understand that curiosity is hard to maintain when you swim with sharks, so maybe don't swim with sharks.
    • elzbardico 7mo ago
      Funny thing is that from all places, banking and finance are some of the ones that more closely understand software not only as a tool for doing business, but as something that informs and define the business itself. I once worked in a big bank where basically 70% of their C-suite and upper management were engineers (not only SE, but civil, electric, naval, etc) who had years of experience in IT. The rest were lawyers and a couple economists. And I am not even talking about the worlds of quant and hft.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• hnlmorg 7mo ago
  I remember being in my early 20s, learning C and Pascal, and having this one kid telling me I was learning dead languages and he’d earn 3 times more than me leaning 4GL as well as himself being 3 times smarter than everyone else too. The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C and this wasn’t going to change any time soon. Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.
• pixelsort 7mo ago
  > There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what tools emerge. I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to evaporate; necessitating AI-assistance. The reason is it different this time around is because the capabilities of LLMs have incentivized the professional class to betray the institutions that enabled their specializations. I am talking about the amazing minds at Adobe, Figma, and the FAANGS who are bridging agentic reasoners and diffusion models with domain-specific needs of their respective professional users. Humans are class of beings, and the humans accelerating the advance of AI in creative tools are the reason that things are different this time. We have class traitors among us this time, and they're "just doing their jobs". For most, willful disbelief isn't even a factor. They think they're helping while each PR just brings them closer to unemployment.
  • nz 7mo ago
    Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their customers and their species. The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their time in the long run. Don't let greed and fear slide. Don't hate someone for choosing their family and comfort over your own, hate the system that forces them to make that choice. Hold them accountable, but attack the system, instead of its hostages and victims.
    • pixelsort 7mo ago
      The level of compliance and enthusiasm varies. Some believe they are making the world a better place. Some feel they're adding value but suspect they are trapped within a cycle they refuse to examine. Some are more connected to the truth, and comply willingly but resentfully. Where you fall depends on where you work and what you work on. You make a great points about the chain of accountability. But, in my opinion, working professionals are the only agents in the system with the potential to realize their own culpability and divert their actions. Perhaps, it isn't fair to point to them and call them traitors. Still, they are the only ones with enough agency to potentially organize and collectively push for the kind of ethics that could save us all.
• manithree 7mo ago
  I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk. Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.
  • aNoob7000 7mo ago
    LOL... I was in the same position. I graduated from high school in 88 and got my first job a couple of years later, working at a small insurance company running IBM AS/400. I had just gotten my job as an operator with a dream of becoming a programmer, and here comes IBM with its CASE tool. I truly thought the world was going to end. A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic, and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder. All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises." Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes. Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs going away? No.
  • bluGill 7mo ago
    A good LLM is a great tool for those who know what they are doing. They can follow some very tedious code paths (if thread 1 is doing this, while thread 4 while thread 2...). However they also can write some really really bad code. They sometimes propose bad solutions/architecture. You need someone knowledge to guide them and keep them on a good path. Back in the 80's there were ads for tools to "dinosaurs" who everyone looked to when their 4GL language failed to solve the problem.
  • antonvs 7mo ago
    I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.
• getnormality 7mo ago
  I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on reality.
  • debo_ 7mo ago
    I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully automating" it. I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.
    • mjevans 7mo ago
      Are they a rare artisan rather than a commodity? Maybe a subtype or cross-trained variation of some other wider job role?
    • rented_mule 7mo ago
      Randomly, I spent an afternoon with a team of loom engineers long ago. In 1989, I took a month-long trip to the USSR. Trips for Americans back then were guided / chaperoned by the Soviet government, with the clear intention of showing off what the Soviet system was capable of. To see their manufacturing prowess, we spent an entire afternoon touring an automated bed-sheet factory and talking with the team that designed and maintained the machines. I don't remember much other than the intense noise and the large number of machines with white cotton sheets coming out. All the sheets we saw in that factory, and in our hotels, were noticeably thicker and stiffer than American sheets, somewhere between American sheets and denim. When we asked about that, they seemed to feel sorry that we only had thin, flimsy sheets.
  • ekidd 7mo ago
    > We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence. The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives. The next goal after that will be to give that machine hands, so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to automate than humans. You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions. But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach. That's the dream.
• debo_ 7mo ago
  I like the arrogance present in the title. "Eternal promise" in a discipline that was conceived about a century ago.
• antonvs 7mo ago
  This topic always reminds me of "The Last One", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) : > "The name derived from the idea that The Last One was the last program that would ever need writing, as it could be used to generate all subsequent software." That was released in 1981. Spoiler alert: it was not, in fact, the last one.
• bluGill 7mo ago
  Something else that really should be mentioned: Every recession where there was mass lay-offs on programmers (not every recession hits programmers hard), there were many articles saying that whatever that latest thing [see article] was the cause of this and industry is getting rid of programmers they will never need again. In every case of course "it is the economy stupid". The tools made little difference in the need for programmers. The tools that worked actually increased the need because things you wouldn't even attempt without the tools were now worth hiring extra people to do.
• miljanm 7mo ago
  what's wrong with eliminating programmers?
• sfblah 7mo ago
  I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can emulate. But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble. So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.
  • designerarvid 7mo ago
    During the 90’s economic crisis all drafters drawing building blueprints by hand disappeared from the Swedish construction industry. Engineers started using CAD instead Just one example of how this has happened again and again.
  • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
    Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.
    • getnormality 7mo ago
      So are you saying that bad programmers play a dual role of attending meetings to get business requirements, in a way that AI cannot do?
      • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
        I am saying, having seen stuff implemented that simply does not make sense to anyone with an understanding of the actual situation on the ground, yes. And the funny thing is, it is not even an llm issue. This is a very, very human issue.
        • 7mo ago
• BobBagwill 7mo ago
  The potentially cool thing about LLM's is bootstrapping. No matter how much COBOL you wrote, COBOL didn't get better. LLM's can be used to make LLM's (and other software stuff) better. LLM's could be used to create their successor(s). Of course, in the end, it won't do us humans any good, because when the Singularity AKA Rapture comes, we'll all be converted to Computronium. :-)
  • elzbardico 7mo ago
    I am convinced that LLMs can't truly create really novel knowledge. They may even surface it in a way that looks novel, but not really create any new knowledge.
• bdcravens 7mo ago
  The market however has done a pretty good job of it, especially when it's a developer bull market that suddenly shifts directions. Case in point: late 90s, the mad rush to put warm bodies in chairs for those who could even spell HTML. A few years later, many had left and gone back to selling cars or whatever they did before.
• BobBagwill 7mo ago
  If most programming is <em>ShitWork &reg;</em> and most programmers are performing ShitWork and LLM's are good at ShitWork, then most programmers are out of a job. If those programmers can pivot to another non-ShitWork or programming-adjacent function, they can remain employed. There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].
  • snackbroken 7mo ago
    Beaucoup.
    • BobBagwill 7mo ago
      Sorry, I meant to say ᬩᬸᬓᬸ.
• megiddo 7mo ago
  I wonder if the common gap here is the inability to reify specification. LLMs seem to be a significant step forward in converting language to code, but they don't seem to engage self-directed abstraction.
• _zagj 7mo ago
  Also in this genre: > The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts at Manned Flight Anyone banking that this technology isn't going to decrease the demand for programmers, or that it's going to offset the lost jobs with new, related ones ("prompt engineer") are kidding themselves. And frankly, it's probably a good thing, at some level, in that there are far too many people in tech with no business being there. How many "developers" are effectively just gluing bits of JavaScript together and juggling NPM dependencies, all day? And how many of them can't even accomplish this feat without a steady supply of Adderall? Ironically, these people seem to be some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters, so it's in some ways fitting that they'll likely be the first to be made redundant.
• coppsilgold 7mo ago
  At the moment LLM's tend to work well when you constrain them, and you can craft the constraints with the help of the same LLM in a different session. Then you can verify if the outputted code obeys the constraints in yet another session, and make it adjust the code to obey the constraints. If one of the constraints was to yield highly functional code, you can start refining function by function as well. There is a pattern here. If you are a good engineer you can dictate data structures to it too. It then performs even better. I believe the writing is on the wall a this point, it does a very adequate job if I invest enough time in writing and refining the specs and give it the data structures (&/| database schemas) I want it to use. And there is no comparison in the number of hours I spend wrangling it and the number of the hours it would take me to do the code myself. This is the worst it's going to be and it's already quite good, it wasn't that good a mere three months ago. The main pitfall is trying to get an LLM to read your mind, in doing so you are putting too much load on whatever passes for their intelligence quotient. That isn't how you get good results or get a good measure of their capabilities.
  • Wobbles42 7mo ago
    I keep hearing "this is the worst it's going to be" as if we can expect a monotonic increase in quality and value generation. Meanwhile, search was better in the past and is at this point the best it's going to be. Enshittification comes for all things.
  • 0xcafefood 7mo ago
    Windows in 1998: this is the worst it's ever going to be. Uber is 2010: this is the worst it's ever going to be. There's some triumphalism here. What happens when training data becomes scarcer because open source as a paradigm was killed? What happens when investor cash flows elsewhere and training and inference need to become profitable on their own?
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• prmph 7mo ago
  One other thing that is often ignored: Most of the business class, executive class, ... even working class, DON'T want to write code. The reasons vary, but in general, just as some people don't want to touch maths (even if they might be good at it if they tried), some people loathe the very idea of being technical, either because they think it is beneath them, or they just don't see themselves that way. And like the article explains, even when "programming" tools seem to become simpler to use, they still require technical specification, and once people feel like they are getting close to "programming" they check out.
  • ithora 7mo ago
    Most people don’t avoid programming because it’s too hard. They avoid it because they don’t identify as technical. Just like math many people who could be decent at it still recoil from it. It’s not capability, it’s identity and preference. Humans aren’t fundamentally logical thinkers, we’re storytelling creatures who occasionally use logic to justify what we already feel.
    • prmph 7mo ago
      > Most people don’t avoid programming because it’s too hard. They avoid it because they don’t identify as technical. But this is exactly what my comment is saying? Not sure what you added that was not already in my comment, you are agreeing with me.
• zahlman 7mo ago
  > These claims deserve scrutiny, not because they are entirely wrong, but because they echo promises made in 1959, in 1973, in 1985, and in 2015. Seems like that little kerfuffle with all the 2-digit years in legacy COBOL code was a well-timed distraction.
• entrustai 7mo ago
  [dead]
  • NBJack 7mo ago
    It has been a while, but I remember a project of mine trying to port a FTP client to a 'secure compiler' (this was long before Rust and probably a distant ancestor of Checked C). In theory, if I could successfully port it, it would be much more resilient to particular kinds of issues (and maybe even attacks). This was in the era where formal proof coding was trying to take off as well in the industry. After wading through an impressive number of compiler errors (again, it was technically compatible) and attempts to fix them, I eventually surrendered and acknowledged that at the very least, this was beyond my abilities. I probably would had gotten much further just rewriting it from scratch.
    • entrustai 7mo ago
      [dead]
• faragon 7mo ago
  Maybe it's time for creating simpler languages, easier to validate with a mix of LLMs, grammar validation, and test-covered aggregation/integration.
• assaddayinh 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hortonhearsafoo 7mo ago
  I have a book from the early 90s on the history of trying to build a machine to beat humans at chess. It reads similarly. We know how that turned out in the end.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• dfilppi 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Rich_Morin 7mo ago
  "With the advent of the new Automatic Programming systems, we'll soon have no need for programmers." -- written about a predecessor of Fortran. My own programming career began in 1970, and included an intriguing visit to Stanford's AI center. I've been an avid fan boi of AI ever since. Currently the folks I'm watching are the Thousand Brains Project, an effort to replicate a network of cortical columns and support services. In any event, I've written code in a variety of languages. My current favorite is Elixir, because it offers fewer booby traps and far more capability than any others I've seen. However, my take on languages is that they let you work at a comfortable level of abstraction. Still, I'm delighted to have an earnest pair of assistants (ChatGPT and Codex CLI) who are able to discuss ideas and issues in my native language. They can also help me translate my rough notes and speculations into (apparently) working code, using whatever resources are available (eg, languages, libraries). Indeed, one of the hardest things to do is to imagine what they are able to do. I suspect that there are at least a few nerdy nine year olds who are grabbing onto this. I also suspect that there are folks who will do unfortunate things with this capability. Should be interesting...