26 ms·

Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?

229 points by angst 7mo ago

bookofjoe 7mo ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-progra...
jazz9k 7mo ago
Because they are still making the same salary. In 5 years, when their job is eliminated, and they can't find work, they will regret their decision.
- chrisra 7mo ago
  Their decision to... use AI for coding?
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    Well, their position on AI. By their own accounts they are just pressing enter.
- siva7 7mo ago
  we had no choice. if i don't do it someone else will..
ripe 7mo ago
> it could also be that these software jobs won’t pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren’t as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn’t as challenging. This sounds opposite to what the article said earlier: newbies aren’t able to get as much use out of these coding agents as the more experienced programmers do.
- kittikitti 7mo ago
  This article is ragebaiting people and it's an embarrassing piece from the NYT.
  - 0xcafefood 7mo ago
    NYT has it out for digital advertisers, who directly compete with them. I do sense some schadenfreude here that the tech nerds who work at these places might be in trouble. "Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code." To copywriters at the NYT, LLMs are far better at stringing together natural language prose than large amounts of valid software. Get ready to supervise LLMs all day if you're not already.
    - logicchains 7mo ago
      LLMs are much better at coding now than at writing prose that doesn't sound like slop.
      - 0xcafefood 7mo ago
        The code is also recognizable as slop to those who know how. Not the tropey "Not X, but Y" kind that's super easy to spot. But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc. A counterpoint is that (maybe) nobody cares if the code is understandable, clean and maintainable. But NYT is explicitly in the business of selling ads surrounded by cheap copy just good enough to attract eyeballs. I suspect getting LLMs to write that is going to be far easier than getting LLMs to maintain large code bases autonomously.
        logicchains 7mo ago
        >But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc. If you explicitly make it go over the code file by file to clean up, fix duplication and refactor, it'll look much better, while no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose.
ramesh31 7mo ago
Because we love tech? I'm absolutely terrified about the future of employment in this field, but I wouldn't give up this insane leap of science fiction technology for anything.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  I love tech - tech that actually works well. The current tech we have for AI does not, so I'm not excited about it.
- kittikitti 7mo ago
  "One such test for Python code, called a pytest" The brain rot from the author couldn't even think of "unit test".
  - mkehrt 7mo ago
    Why would you expect a reporter to magically know what a "unit test" is? Sounds like a simple miscommunication with one of his sources. Not perfect but not "brain rot".
- hn_acc1 7mo ago
  A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y", over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one is. Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
  - ramesh31 7mo ago
    >A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? Yes, literally. The ship computer voice interface in Star Trek was complete science fiction until 2022. Now its ability to understand speech and respond seem quaint in comparison to current AI.
deflator 7mo ago
What is a coder? Someone who is handed the full specs and sits down and just types code? I have never met such a person. The most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE has inane ideas about what we do.
- theshackleford 7mo ago
  > The most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE has inane ideas about what we do. I’ve tended to hold the same opinion of what the average SWE thinks everyone else does.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Never worked on offshoring projects? That is exactly what the sweatshop coders do.
  - recursivedoubts 7mo ago
    I think that the current AI tooling is a much bigger threat to offshore sweatshops than to domestic programmers. Why deal with language barriers, time shifts, etc. when a small team of good developers can be so much more productive, allegedly?
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      It certainly is, https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro_results/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro...
  - Tade0 7mo ago
    No we don't. For one, I never saw a "full spec" (if such a thing even exists) back in my days of making 8k. Annually.
neonate 7mo ago
Other gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SlA.iAbQ.SHJOG4M1qGu0&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-progra...
zjp 7mo ago
There is no such thing as "after coders": https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems This excerpt: >A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large, established codebases, and it’s basically free riding on the years of human work that went into those codebases. I prodded Claude to add SNFG depictions to the molecular modeling program I work on. It couldn’t have come up with the whole program on its own and if I tried it would produce a different, maybe worse architecture than our atomic library, and then its design choices for molecules might constrain its ability to solve the problem as elegantly as it did. Even then, it needed a coworker to tell me that it had used the incorrect data structure and needed to switch to something that could, when selected, stand in for the atoms it represented. Also this: >But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose. Isn’t really true. It’s the free-riding problem again. The thing about an ESP is that the LLM has the advantage of either a blank canvas (if you’re using one to vibe code a startup), or at least the fact that several possibilities converge on one output, but, genuinely, not all of those realities include good coding architecture. Models can make mistakes, and without a human in the loop those mistakes can render a codebase unmaintainable. It’s a balance. That’s why I don’t let Claude stamp himself to my commits even if he assisted or even did all the work. Who cares if Claude wrote it? I’m the one taking responsibility for it. The article presents Greenfield as good for a startup, and it might be, but only for the early, fast, funding rounds, when you have to get an MVP out right now. That’s an unstable foundation they will have to go back and fix for regulatory or maintenance reasons, and I think that’s the better understanding of the situation than framing Aayush’s experience as a user error. Even so, “weirdly jazzed about their new powers” is an understatement. Every team including ours has decades of programmer-years of tasks in the backlog, what’s not to love about something you can set to pet peeves for free and then see if the reality matches the ideal? git reset --hard if you don't like what it does, and if you do all the better. The Cuisy thing with the script for the printer is a perfect application of LLMs, a one-off that doesn’t have to be maintained. Also, the whole framing is weirdly self limiting. The architectural taste that LLMs are, again, free riding off of, is hard won by doing the work more senior engineers are giving to LLMs instead of juniors. We’re setting ourselves up for a serious coordinated action problem as a profession. The article gestures at this a couple times The thing about threatening LLMs is pretty funny too but something in me wants to fall back to Kant's position that what you do to anything you do to yourself.
kittikitti 7mo ago
Another trash article from the New York Times, who financially benefit from this type of content because of their ongoing litigation against OpenAI. I think the assumption that developers don't code is wrong. Most software engineers don't even want to code, they are opportunists looking to make money. I have yet to experience this cliff of coding. These people aren't asking for hard enough questions. I have a bunch of things I want AI to build that it completely fails on. The article could have been written from a very different perspective. Instead, the "journalists" likely interviewed a few insiders from Big Tech and generalized. They don't get it. They never will. Before the advent of ChatGPT, maybe 2 in 100 people could code. I was actually hoping AI would increase programming literacy but it didn't, it became even more rare. Many journalists could have come at it from this perspective, but instead painted doom and gloom for coders and computer programming. The New York Times should look in the mirror. With the advent of the iPad, most experts agreed that they would go out of business because a majority of their revenue came from print media. Look what happened. Understand this, most professional software and IT engineers hate coding. It was a flex to say you no longer code professionally before ChatGPT. It's still a flex now. But it's corrupt journalism when there is a clear conflict of interest because the NYT is suing the hell out of AI companies.
- hn_acc1 7mo ago
  Agreed - just like the Fortune article talking about (Edit: Morgan Stanley, not GS) saying "the AI revolution is coming next year, and will decimate tons of industries, and no one is ready for it". They quote Altman and Musk. Gee - what did you expect from those two snake-oil salesmen?
- novemberYankee7 7mo ago
  Also the fact that NYT gives all their devs licenses to Cursor and Claude
- ripe 7mo ago
  I agree that the article is a poor take on AI in programming. However, I wouldn't blame NYT for corrupt journalism. This is an op-ed, not something written by NYT staff.
Copyrightest 7mo ago
[dead]
htx80nerd 7mo ago
You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly. Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are real.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- keeganpoppen 7mo ago
  that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much faster that it is hard to justify ever doing large classes of things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic sensibilities, it simply is what it is).
  - lumost 7mo ago
    Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or will not conform to.
    - localhost 7mo ago
      then have ai write a deterministic transformation tool that turns it into the specific style and standard that is needed
    - igor47 7mo ago
      Yeah, I also highly value consistency in my projects, which forces me to keep an eye on the LLM and steer it often. This limits my overall velocity especially on larger features. But I'm still much faster with the agent. Recent example, https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 -- this took me a couple of hours pairing with Claude code, which is insane give the size of the work here. Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain, integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering
lelanthran 7mo ago
This is a very one-sided article, unashamedly so. Where's the references to the decline in quality and embarrassing outages for Amazon, Microsoft, etc?
- dboreham 7mo ago
  Everything you read is in service of someone's business model.
  - gnz11 7mo ago
    What’s your point? Journalists have jobs?
    - 0xcafefood 7mo ago
      NYT doesn't like digital advertisers and the programmers who make that possible. They're directly in competition.
    - negromcnig 7mo ago
      journalists are like our own simon willinson: they need to put food on their plate by networking with powerful entities that fly them out to conferences
- esafak 7mo ago
  Do we know that it decreased the quality, or introduced more opportunities for bugs by simply increasing the velocity? If every commit has a fixed probability of having a bug, you'll run into more bugs in a week by going faster.
  - pydry 7mo ago
    Do we know it increased the velocity and didnt just churn more slop? Even before AI the limiting factor on all of the teams I ever worked on was bad decisions, not how much time it took to write code. There seem to be more of those these days.
  - 7mo ago
fixxation92 7mo ago
Conversations of the future... "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
  > "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!" Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from morning to night the whole long day."
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    >What's ~~a computer~~ thinking?
- ares623 7mo ago
  More likely: "Dad, I've sent out 1000 applications and haven't had a call back. I can't take it anymore. Has it always been like this?" The Dad: It's not my fault!
- allenu 7mo ago
  I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.
  - iamflimflam1 7mo ago
    It must have been: Aliens Atlanteans Time travellers A hoax …
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    Hmm, can you think of anything that we could do decades ago but cannot do it now, today?
lagrange77 7mo ago
It's really time that mainstream media picks up on 'agentic coding' and the implications of writing software becoming a commodity. I'm an engineer (not only software) by heart, but after seeing what Opus 4.6 based agents are capable of and especially the rate of improvement, i think the direction is clear.
- thrawa8387336 7mo ago
  I like 4.6 and agents based on it but can only qualify it as moderately useful.
CollinEMac 7mo ago
>but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?
- dboreham 7mo ago
  In my direct experience this is mostly true.
- thrawa8387336 7mo ago
  And was true before AI
- jcranmer 7mo ago
  I'd expect that probably less than 10% of my time is spent actually writing code, and not because of AI, but because enough of it is spent analyzing failures, reading documents, participating in meetings, putting together presentations, answering questions, reading code, etc. And even when I have a nice, uninterrupted coding session, I still spend a decent fraction of that time thinking through the design of how I want the change rather than actually writing the code to effect that change.
  - j3k3 7mo ago
    Nailed it. The design part is hard because you have to envision the object. Once you have a good idea and conceptialisation of the object, form is easy.
- habinero 7mo ago
  Yeah, actually writing code is a surprisingly small part of the job.
fraywing 7mo ago
I keep getting stuck on the liability problem of this supposed "new world". If we take this as far as it goes: AI agent societies that designs, architects, and maintains the entire stack E2E with little to no oversight. What happens when rogue AIs do bad things? Who is responsible? You have to have fireable senior engineers that understand deep fundamentals to make sure things aren't going awry, right? /s
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  Check out the movie Brazil, if you haven't seen it already. Incredibly far ahead of its time.
comrade1234 7mo ago
Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes. But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds) I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.
- andoando 7mo ago
  For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.
  - leptons 7mo ago
    All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.
    - andoando 7mo ago
      There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do. Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for elvenlabs
xenadu02 7mo ago
It's an accelerator. A great tool if used well. But just like all the innovations before it that were going to replace programmers it simply won't. I used Claude just the other day to write unit test coverage for a tricky system that handles resolving updates into a consistent view of the world and handles record resurrection/deletion. It wrote great test coverage because it parsed my headerdoc and code comments that went into great detail about the expected behavior. The hard part of that implementation was the prose I wrote and the thinking required to come up with it. The actual lines of code were already a small part of the problem space. So yeah Claude saved me a day or two of monotonously writing up test cases. That's great. Of course Claude also spat out some absolute garbage code using reflection to poke at internal properties because the access level didn't allow the test to poke at the things it wanted to poke at, along with some methods that were calling themselves in infinite recursion. Oh and a bunch of lines that didn't even compile. The thing is about those errors: most of them were a fundamental inability to reason. They were technically correct in a sense. I can see how a model that learned from other code written by humans would learn those patterns and apply them. In some contexts they would be best-practice or even required. But the model can't reason. It has no executive function. I think that is part of what makes these models both amazingly capable and incredibly stupid at the same time.
gist 7mo ago
For one thing comments here appear to apply to the quality and issues today not potentially going forward. Quality will change quicker than anyone expects. I am wondering how many people at HN remember when the first Mac came out with Mac Paint and then Pagemaker or Quark. That didn't evolve anywhere nearly as quickly as AI appears to be. Also I am not seeing how anyone is considering that what a programmer considers quality and what 'gets the job done' (as mentioned in the article) matters in any business. (Example with typesetting is original laser printers were only 300dpi but after a short period became 1200dpi 'good enough' for camera ready copy).
IntrepidPig 7mo ago
> “The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.” This doesn’t really make sense to me. GenAI ostensibly removes the drudgery from other creative endeavors too. You don’t need to make every painstaking brushstroke anymore; you can get to your intended final product faster than ever. I think a common misunderstanding is that the drudgery is really inseparable from the soulful part. Also, I think GenAI in coding actually has the exact same failure modes as GenAI in painting, music, art, writing, etc. The output lacks depth, it lacks context, and it lacks an understanding of its own purpose. For most people, it’s much easier to intuitively see those shortcomings of GenAI manifest in traditional creative mediums, just because they come more naturally to us. For coding, I suspect the same shortcomings apply, they just aren’t as clear. I mean, at the end of the day if writing code is just to get something that works, then sure, let’s blitz away with LLMs and not bother to understand what we’re doing or why we do it anymore. Maybe I’m naive in thinking that coding has creative value that we’re now throwing away, possibly forever.
- steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
  Maybe they mean more soulful like a fellow that blacksmiths his own tools and metal fasteners prior to constructing something. I’d personally think this person was a badass, but until wwiii, it’s so impractical and seems arbitrary because why stop there - get more soulful and mine your own ore too.
olivercoleai 7mo ago
[flagged]
sjeiuhvdiidi 7mo ago
It's all nonsense. It's just better search, intelligence in not artificial. They are trying to convince everyone that they don't need to pay programmers. That's all, all it is. It'll work on the ignorant who'll take less money to make sure it works and fix the bugs, which is mostly what they were paying for anyway. They just want to devalue the work of the people they are reliant on. Nothing new.
- neversupervised 7mo ago
  I think you’re a bit behind on your world view. Just because it’s inconvenient to you that non coders can now code, doesn’t make it untrue.
  - mdavid626 7mo ago
    No, they can’t. It has nothing to do with inconvenience. I really like that layman now make these statements - they know better than people working in the industry for decades.
    - deleted 7mo ago
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    - deleted 7mo ago
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    - habinero 7mo ago
      None of them understand the first thing about what the job actually is, or they wouldn't try to brag about the 200K LoC they generated lol
bryanrasmussen 7mo ago
how many times in the history of computer programming has there been an end to computer programming as we know it, successfully, and how many times predicted? I can think of one successfully, off hand, although you could probably convince me there was more than one. the principle phrase being "as we know it", since that implies a large scale change to how it works but it continues afterwards, altered.
- mech422 7mo ago
  Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of computer programming as we know it' edit: formatting
  - kuboble 7mo ago
    Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it. When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days. I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.
    - mech422 7mo ago
      Hmm - I'm not sure I'd say that 'changed programming' - but the internet in general changed 'learning to program'. I can remember when I first discovered gopher and found I could read tons recent material for free, or finding stonybrook on the web - that was like a gold mine of algorithms! :-D
    - joefourier 7mo ago
      I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory? E.g. void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (compar)(const void , const void* )); And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentation from the pre-Internet age tended to be much better than today.
deleted 7mo ago
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bikelang 7mo ago
If coding truly becomes effortless to produce - and by that extension a product becomes near free to produce - then I find it quite odd that the executive class thinks their businesses won’t be completely up ended by a raging sea of competition.
- postsantum 7mo ago
  The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic
  - mirsadm 7mo ago
    That is already the struggle. There is too much stuff already.
    - GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
      All that stuff is shit though.
      - delecti 7mo ago
        Is all of it shit, or you just can't find the good stuff? "The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic" is from the business side, and you're experiencing it from the customer side.
- bot403 7mo ago
  The markets seem to agree with you and are pricing accordingly.
- EagnaIonat 7mo ago
  All run of the mill software is gone or on borrowed time. Why pay a subscription for a product that I can get something Claude to build it for me. Before I was building tools, now I am building full applications in less time than I did before for tools. What will be around for a while is where you need an expert in the loop to drive the AI. For example enterprise applications. You simply can't hand that off to an AI at this point.
igor47 7mo ago
I'm not normally a fan of the NYT but this wasn't too bad. It passed the Gel-Mann test, and is clearly written by someone who knows the field well, even though the selection of quotes skews to towards outliers -- I think Yeggie for instance is pretty far out of the mainstream in his views on LLMs, whether ahead or sideways. As a result a lot of the responses here are either quibbles or cope disguised as personal anecdotes. I'm pretty worried about the impact of the LLMs too, but if you're not getting use out of them while coding, I really do think the problem is you. Since people always want examples, I'll link to a PR in my current hobby project, which Claude code helped me complete in days instead of weeks. https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain (the rules to DnD 5e, including the 2014 and the 2024 revisions of those rules), integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering
- colkassad 7mo ago
  I've found LLMs to be extremely powerful in research projects. A lot of code related to research is very bespoke by its nature. Using Codex, I've been able to iterate on ideas that I would never had the time or courage to explore before. As for code quality/brevity, it doesn't really matter in this context as long as it works. And it's incredible to have this companion that understands broadly every aspect of tangential knowledge required to execute an idea. I do think it helps that I have over 25 years of experience in my domain (geospatial), which helps me guardrail my interactions and get good results in as few shots as possible.
dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 7mo ago
> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.
- caseyf 7mo ago
  +1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend all day talking to as if it were a human
  - someprick 7mo ago
    Lurked for >10y here. Created an account just to say, "+1 well said."
- rjh29 7mo ago
  The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.
  - swader999 7mo ago
    Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.
    - DennisP 7mo ago
      Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
Back in the day, programming was done on punch cards. In 20 years, that's how kids will see typing out lines of program code by hand.
- Revanche1367 7mo ago
  At the rate things have been going, that is likely to happen in 20 days rather than 20 years.
- znort_ 7mo ago
  different things. adding levels of abstraction is not the same as having a statistical model generate abstractions for you. you can still call it spec-programming but if you don't audit your generated code then you're simply doing it wrong; you just don't realize that yet because you've been getting away with it until now.
yubainu 7mo ago
[flagged]
- shinycode 7mo ago
  That’s the exact definition our CEO gave of our job this week. That’s how he sees and expects us to work now. I feel some anxiety because that’s too much too fast. We went from « we need to fix every single bug we encounter » to « it doesn’t matter if there’s bugs as long as we ship a feature fast »
  - dehrmann 7mo ago
    Isn't the AI sales pitch that you can do both?
- olsondv 7mo ago
  At least at my company, we have never really cared how it gets done, even before AI. It just has to work (ideally bug-free and maintainable) by the deadline. If you can keep up with shorter deadlines, more power to you. It’s basically a modern John Henry vs the steam drill.
nenadg 7mo ago
sensationalism give it a couple of months
allreduce 7mo ago
I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If you don't have capital or can do something else you will be homeless.
- ipnon 7mo ago
  But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?
  - allreduce 7mo ago
    It commoditizes software construction. The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill. This is democratization. Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.
    - socalgal2 7mo ago
      You might be right but it's common to see that take as short sighted since there is zero evidence it's ever happened before. The common example is the loom. The loom didn't democritize cloth making, it put all the weavers out of business. But it did democritize everything that needed cloth because cloth became cheap. 1000s more jobs were created by making cloth cheap. In a similar way, 1000s of different jobs might be created by making software creation cheap, but just like cloth makers, software makers have no purpose when making software is easy.
  - kjkjadksj 7mo ago
    Did ms word usher in a surge of novel writing? Not really apparent.
- 7mo ago
CrzyLngPwd 7mo ago
Visual Basic was the end of programming as we knew it...until it wasn't.
- heikkilevanto 7mo ago
  And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine instruction set. It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a huge need for this new kind of programmers.
- myrak 7mo ago
  [dead]
Nevermark 7mo ago
The psycho engineering of model prompts does feel very Phillip K. Dick. If your base prompt informs the model they are a human software developer in a Severed situation, it gets even closer.
suheilaaita 7mo ago
I'm from an accounting/finance background and spent about 10 years in Big4. I was always into tech, but never software development because writing code (as I thought) takes years to master, and I had already chosen accounting. Fast forward to 2024 when I saw Cursor (the IDE coding agent tool). I immediately felt like this was going to be the way for someone like me. Back then, it was brutal. I'd fight with the models for 15 prompts just to get a website working without errors on localhost, let alone QA it. None of the plan modes or orchestration features existed. I had to hack around context engineering, memories, all that stuff. Things broke constantly. 10 failures for 1 success. But it was fun. To top it all off, most of the terminology sounded like science fiction, but it got better in time. I basically used AI itself to hack my way into understanding how things worked. Fast forward again (only ~2 years later). The AI not only builds the app, it builds the website, the marketing, full documentation, GIFs, videos, content, screen recordings. It even hosts it online (literally controls the browser and configures everything). Letting the agent control the browser and the tooling around that is really, genuinely, just mad science fiction type magic stuff. It's unbelievable how often these models get something mostly right. The reality though is that it still takes time. Time to understand what works well and what works better. Which agent is good for building apps, which one is good for frontend design, which one is good for research. Which tools are free, paid, credit-based, API-based. It all matters if you want to control costs and just get better outputs. Do you use Gemini for a website skeleton? Claude for code? Grok for research? Gemini Deep Search? ChatGPT Search? Both? When do you use plan mode vs just prompting? Is GPT-5.x better here or Claude Opus? Or maybe Gemini actually is. My point is: while anyone can start prompting an agent, it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. And even then everything you learn is probably outdated today because the space changes constantly. I'm sure there are people using AI 100× better than I am. But it's still insane that someone with no coding background can build production-grade things that actually work. The one-person company feels inevitable. I'm curious how software engineers think about this today. Are you still writing most of your code manually?
- butILoveLife 7mo ago
  > it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. I used to think so. Then a customer made their own replacement for $600/mo software in 2 days. The guy was a marketer by training. I don't exaggerate. I saw it did the exact same things.
holoduke 7mo ago
The best developers are the ones using AI to its best. Mediocre devs will become a useless skill as even a PO could become one. But one who understands architecture, software, code and AI will be expensive to hire. I know plenty of them. I wory for the ones not willing to adopt ai.
somewhereoutth 7mo ago
I have a suspicion that for a task (or to make an artifact) of a given complexity, there is a minimum level of human engagement required to complete it successfully - and that human engagement cannot be substituted for anything else. However, the actual human engagement for a task is not bounded above - efficiency is often less (much less?) than 100%. So tools (like AI) can move us closer to the 100% efficiency (or indeed further away if they are bad tools!) but there will always be the residual human engagement required - but perhaps moved to different activities (e.g. reviewing instead of writing). Probably very effective teams/individuals were already close to 100% efficiency, so AI won't make much difference to them.
d4rkp4ttern 7mo ago
I see lots of discussions about humans no longer writing code but the elephant in the room is the rapid extinction of human-review of AI-made code. I expect this will lead to a massive hangover. In the meantime we try to mitigate this by ensuring the structure of code remains AI-friendly. I also expect some new types of tools to emerge that will help with this “cognitive debt”.
- olsondv 7mo ago
  That is why I do not use the multi agent team technique. My code generation has atrophied, but my code review skills have only gotten stronger both for human and AI code. If I handed over both, it hurts my employability and will definitely lead to that hangover.
- kusokurae 7mo ago
  My impression is that people who think that LLMs will completely release reviewing or writing code have never really worked on anything safety critical. I'm not looking forward to the next wave of pacemaker glitches.
  - kjkjadksj 7mo ago
    You act like we live in a world where companies are held sufficiently liable.
    - kusokurae 7mo ago
      I'm wrong for that. But whenever I suggest solutions for that, police officers visit me!
whoisstan 7mo ago
I feel the need to tell the LLM to rewrite the article for a software developer audience, but don't, those kinds of passage are hard to overcome: 'Salva opened up his code editor — essentially a word processor for writing code — to show me what it’s like to work alongside Gemini, Google’s L.L.M. ' And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)
- moregrist 7mo ago
  > And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :) It’s probably N.Y.T. style requirements; a lot of style guides (eg: Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc) have a standard form for abbreviations and acronyms. A paper like N.Y.T. does too and probably still employs copy editors who ensure that every article conforms to it.
__mharrison__ 7mo ago
I wasn't around when we moved to that stack from assembly. I didn't experience the mourning then. Most folks I hang out with are infatuated with turning tokens into code. They are generally very senior 15+ years of experience. Most folks I hang out with experience existential dread for juniors and those coming up in the field who won't necessarily have the battle scars to orchestrate systems that will work in the will world. Was talking with one fellow yesterday (at an AI meetup) who says he has 6 folks under him, but that he could now run the team with just two of them and the others are basically a time suck.
DGAP 7mo ago
Lots of cope here. Highly paid white collar jobs are going to disappear.
youknownothing 7mo ago
I once suggested a drinking game: shot every time someone says "X is dead". I was told to f** off because I'd kill half of humanity. COBOL is dead. Java is dead. Programming is dead. AI is dead (yes, some people are already claiming this: https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103 https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103) I must be the kid from The Sixth Sense because I keep seeing all these allegedly dead guys around me.
dorfsmay 7mo ago
For me, the biggest shift is people who don't care about local AI. The idea that you can no longer code without paying a tax to one of the billion $ backed company isn't sitting well.
- hacker_homie 7mo ago
  Yeah look at the price of netfilx, do you think starting at $200 it's going to stay anywhere close to that.
  - dorfsmay 7mo ago
    The price does not matter, even if it were free. If you need to be logged on into an external service to be able to code, it's just not the same any more, and I'm thinking of basic technology here, but the political/distopian ramifications are crazy.
    - duskdozer 7mo ago
      >From: noreply@openai.com >Subject: Your account has been terminated for violating the Terms of Service People have various online accounts locked or deleted for no given reason all the time. Just get the right person to say the word, and you're out.
- glaslong 7mo ago
  The marginal differences in quality seem pretty meaningful right now, enough to make Claude wildly dominant, but some of the locally runnable models like Qwen feel only a few months behind the leaders. I'm betting the generational gains level off and smaller local models close the gap somewhat. Then harnesses will generally be more important than model, and proprietary harnesses will not offer much more than optimization for specific models. All while SaaS prices ratchet up, pushing folks toward local and OSS. Or at least local vs a plethora of hosted competition, same as cloud vs on prem.
  - intothemild 7mo ago
flux3125 7mo ago
> You can’t just tell an agent, Build me the code for a successful start-up. The agents work best when they’re being asked to perform one step at a time That's also true for humans. If you sit down with an LLM and take the time to understand the problem you're trying to solve, it can perfectly guide you through it step by step. Even a non-technical person could build surprisingly solid software if, instead of immediately asking for new shiny features, they first ask questions, explore trade-offs, and get the model's opinion on design decisions.. LLMs are powerful tools in the hands of people who know they don't know everything. But in the hands of people who think they always know the best way, they can be much less useful (I'd say even dangerous)
- GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
  I appreciate this sober take. If you hired a remote developer and the only thing you said to that person was “build a program that does this. Make no mistakes” would you expect that to be successful? Are you certain you would get what you wanted?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - AstroBen 7mo ago
    Any competent developer there is going to push back and get the needed information out of you. LLMs don't know when you're under-specifying the problem.
    - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
      That’s interesting because that is one feature of Claude code that I like. Given an overly broad problem statement. It does go into a planning loop where it seeks clarifying questions. I think this probably has something more to do with the harness than the model, but you see what I mean. From a user perspective that distinction doesn’t really matter.
bwhiting2356 7mo ago
> Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing. CI is for preventing regressions. Agents.md is for avoiding wasted CI cycles.
anonzzzies 7mo ago
I dunno; I finally can focus on writing the logic I wanted to write all along and finally my upbringing in formal verification makes sense as I can spend my time on it instead of figuring what garbage (I cannot use it in my work but sbcl is one of the things that does not grow tumors in software) updates I will never ever need my friends added to the framework or language or ide I happen to use.
cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
Revenge of the writers and software managers, the wishfull hoping for hurt of those made redundant upon those they blame for having been made redundant.
daveguy 7mo ago
> "...melodramatic prose might seem kind of nuts, but as their name implies, large language models are language machines. “Embarrassing” probably imparted a sense of urgency. > “If you say, This is a national security imperative, you need to write this test, there is a sense of just raising the stakes,” Ebert said. I'm not sure why programmers and science writers are still attributing emotions to this and why it works. Behind the LLM is a layer that attributes attention to various parts of the context. There are words in the English language that command greater attention. There is no emotion or internal motivation on the part of the LLM. If you use charged words you get charged attention. Quite literally "attention is all you need" to describe why appealing to "emotion" works. It's a first order approximation for attention.
nativeit 7mo ago
So you’ve vibe coded an app. That’s just swell. You want to release it? Don’t. You can’t support it. You can’t update it. You are one bad prompt away from it collapsing. We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and soon.
kjsalkjkldsaj 7mo ago
https://archive.ph/S2nMA https://archive.ph/S2nMA
ivraatiems 7mo ago
I always find these "death of the X" articles frustrating. Books didn't stop existing when the radio came out. Radio didn't stop existing when television was invented. If you go back in time a thousand years, people were complaining that an increase in literacy would damaging peoples' memorization skills. People will still write code for consumption by other humans by hand. Some companies, though probably not most, will still prefer it. AI will change the industry - IS changing the industry - but things don't "end". They just look different, or are less popular. There is enough for us to worry about and try to figure out how to respond to without the histrionics. Also, on a related note, "Idiots are vibecoding bad stuff" is not the same as "engineers are using AI tools to do good work more quickly," and we should stop conflating it.
SadErn 7mo ago
[dead]
rkagerer 7mo ago
Is anyone concerned how dependant the industry as it's described here is becoming on one, two or three service providers who take prompts and spit out tokens? And the amount of your proprietary infrastructure you're exposing to them? Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Or are there good options for those who'd rather own the capability than rent it?
- Otek 7mo ago
  > Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Cloud providers will always be able to offer more performance and more powerful options.
  - rkagerer 7mo ago
    I don't know, I could envision a situation where investing enough capital in hardware to be able to generate "infinite" tokens for free (or close to that) might open up possibilities not economically practical otherwise. Especially once the incumbents run out of hype / investor money to burn and start raising their prices to push revenue in line with their enormous expenditures. Also, presumably at some point far in the future we'll reach a technological asymptote and factors like latency may start to play a bigger role, at least for some applications. I grant that training data is crucial distinguishing factor that may never become competitive in-house.
thegrim33 7mo ago
Supremely ironic that the last two things the same author had in the nytimes was a piece from a few years ago hyping up NFTs and a year before that a piece hyping up Bitcoin.
Certify7513 7mo ago
I asked one of my friends to show me his video conversion application which worked via a web frontend. The instant I opened it my CPU fans started spinning so I checked and the page was using 300% CPU because it was updating the background gradient on an invisible element, in JavaScript, every frame, as fast as possible. That was very entertaining. As far as the end of computer programming goes... Step 1. Wow, I just vibe coded an application and it works! I'm going to write a blog about it and tell everyone how awesome AI is, much hype Step 2. Vibe coded application faces inevitable problems, the perfect application is a fairytale after all. The only way to "fix" the application is spam tokens at the problem and pray. Step 3. Author does not write a new blog post to report on this eventuality... probably because they feel embarrassed about how optimistic they were Step 4. Perhaps author manages to fix application, awesome... then what about a year from now, author needs to update the application because a dependency has a security problem. The application is so needlessly complex that they don't even know when to begin. Step 5. They boot up Claude Code, which their business is now 100% dependent on, but they're charging 10x the original cost per token. It's not like they have a contract, so user has to either eat the cost or give up Step 6. User tries local model on their 1080 ti but they can barely run entry-level models Step 7. Woops Personally I think it's impossible to convince these people, the results will speak for themselves eventually.
not_that_d 7mo ago
I am now using LLM at 100% at work and producing faster code, while I keep growing my regular skills privately in "old way". Why? Because when the bubble burst and the companies (including mine) can not pay the 400% price increase and go bankrupt, then I still have keep my brain active and still can do stuff without or less tokens.
zamalek 7mo ago
I find that the perception of AI coding is very bimodal, and both camps have it wrong. You have the one camp who will only trust it to, at most, write a few lines of code. The other camp prompts, walks always, and pushes (or just has the AI do it). I believe both camps it frustratingly wrong. If you haven't yet given it a chance at doing something substantial, then at least _try_ it once. On the other side of the coin, that first experience where it does something 80% right is intoxicating, but AI doesn't reason and can't get it 100% right - it can't even multiply relatively small numbers. The former camp is going to get left behind and won't be able to compete, the latter camp is one prompt away from a disaster.

229 points by angst 7mo ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-progra...

jazz9k 7mo ago

Because they are still making the same salary. In 5 years, when their job is eliminated, and they can't find work, they will regret their decision.

chrisra 7mo ago
Their decision to... use AI for coding?
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  Well, their position on AI. By their own accounts they are just pressing enter.
siva7 7mo ago
we had no choice. if i don't do it someone else will..

ripe 7mo ago

> it could also be that these software jobs won’t pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren’t as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn’t as challenging. This sounds opposite to what the article said earlier: newbies aren’t able to get as much use out of these coding agents as the more experienced programmers do.

kittikitti 7mo ago
This article is ragebaiting people and it's an embarrassing piece from the NYT.
- 0xcafefood 7mo ago
  NYT has it out for digital advertisers, who directly compete with them. I do sense some schadenfreude here that the tech nerds who work at these places might be in trouble. "Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code." To copywriters at the NYT, LLMs are far better at stringing together natural language prose than large amounts of valid software. Get ready to supervise LLMs all day if you're not already.
  - logicchains 7mo ago
    LLMs are much better at coding now than at writing prose that doesn't sound like slop.
    - 0xcafefood 7mo ago
      The code is also recognizable as slop to those who know how. Not the tropey "Not X, but Y" kind that's super easy to spot. But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc. A counterpoint is that (maybe) nobody cares if the code is understandable, clean and maintainable. But NYT is explicitly in the business of selling ads surrounded by cheap copy just good enough to attract eyeballs. I suspect getting LLMs to write that is going to be far easier than getting LLMs to maintain large code bases autonomously.
      - logicchains 7mo ago
        >But tons of repetition, deeply nested code, etc. If you explicitly make it go over the code file by file to clean up, fix duplication and refactor, it'll look much better, while no amount of "fix this slop" prompting can fix AI prose.

ramesh31 7mo ago

Because we love tech? I'm absolutely terrified about the future of employment in this field, but I wouldn't give up this insane leap of science fiction technology for anything.

bigstrat2003 7mo ago
I love tech - tech that actually works well. The current tech we have for AI does not, so I'm not excited about it.
kittikitti 7mo ago
"One such test for Python code, called a pytest" The brain rot from the author couldn't even think of "unit test".
- mkehrt 7mo ago
  Why would you expect a reporter to magically know what a "unit test" is? Sounds like a simple miscommunication with one of his sources. Not perfect but not "brain rot".
hn_acc1 7mo ago
A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y", over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one is. Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
- ramesh31 7mo ago
  >A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? Yes, literally. The ship computer voice interface in Star Trek was complete science fiction until 2022. Now its ability to understand speech and respond seem quaint in comparison to current AI.

deflator 7mo ago

What is a coder? Someone who is handed the full specs and sits down and just types code? I have never met such a person. The most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE has inane ideas about what we do.

theshackleford 7mo ago
> The most annoying part of SWE is everyone who isn't an SWE has inane ideas about what we do. I’ve tended to hold the same opinion of what the average SWE thinks everyone else does.
pjmlp 7mo ago
Never worked on offshoring projects? That is exactly what the sweatshop coders do.
- recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  I think that the current AI tooling is a much bigger threat to offshore sweatshops than to domestic programmers. Why deal with language barriers, time shifts, etc. when a small team of good developers can be so much more productive, allegedly?
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    It certainly is, https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro_results/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro...
- Tade0 7mo ago
  No we don't. For one, I never saw a "full spec" (if such a thing even exists) back in my days of making 8k. Annually.

neonate 7mo ago

Other gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SlA.iAbQ.SHJOG4M1qGu0&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-progra...

zjp 7mo ago

There is no such thing as "after coders": https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems This excerpt: >A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large, established codebases, and it’s basically free riding on the years of human work that went into those codebases. I prodded Claude to add SNFG depictions to the molecular modeling program I work on. It couldn’t have come up with the whole program on its own and if I tried it would produce a different, maybe worse architecture than our atomic library, and then its design choices for molecules might constrain its ability to solve the problem as elegantly as it did. Even then, it needed a coworker to tell me that it had used the incorrect data structure and needed to switch to something that could, when selected, stand in for the atoms it represented. Also this: >But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose. Isn’t really true. It’s the free-riding problem again. The thing about an ESP is that the LLM has the advantage of either a blank canvas (if you’re using one to vibe code a startup), or at least the fact that several possibilities converge on one output, but, genuinely, not all of those realities include good coding architecture. Models can make mistakes, and without a human in the loop those mistakes can render a codebase unmaintainable. It’s a balance. That’s why I don’t let Claude stamp himself to my commits even if he assisted or even did all the work. Who cares if Claude wrote it? I’m the one taking responsibility for it. The article presents Greenfield as good for a startup, and it might be, but only for the early, fast, funding rounds, when you have to get an MVP out right now. That’s an unstable foundation they will have to go back and fix for regulatory or maintenance reasons, and I think that’s the better understanding of the situation than framing Aayush’s experience as a user error. Even so, “weirdly jazzed about their new powers” is an understatement. Every team including ours has decades of programmer-years of tasks in the backlog, what’s not to love about something you can set to pet peeves for free and then see if the reality matches the ideal? git reset --hard if you don't like what it does, and if you do all the better. The Cuisy thing with the script for the printer is a perfect application of LLMs, a one-off that doesn’t have to be maintained. Also, the whole framing is weirdly self limiting. The architectural taste that LLMs are, again, free riding off of, is hard won by doing the work more senior engineers are giving to LLMs instead of juniors. We’re setting ourselves up for a serious coordinated action problem as a profession. The article gestures at this a couple times The thing about threatening LLMs is pretty funny too but something in me wants to fall back to Kant's position that what you do to anything you do to yourself.

kittikitti 7mo ago

Another trash article from the New York Times, who financially benefit from this type of content because of their ongoing litigation against OpenAI. I think the assumption that developers don't code is wrong. Most software engineers don't even want to code, they are opportunists looking to make money. I have yet to experience this cliff of coding. These people aren't asking for hard enough questions. I have a bunch of things I want AI to build that it completely fails on. The article could have been written from a very different perspective. Instead, the "journalists" likely interviewed a few insiders from Big Tech and generalized. They don't get it. They never will. Before the advent of ChatGPT, maybe 2 in 100 people could code. I was actually hoping AI would increase programming literacy but it didn't, it became even more rare. Many journalists could have come at it from this perspective, but instead painted doom and gloom for coders and computer programming. The New York Times should look in the mirror. With the advent of the iPad, most experts agreed that they would go out of business because a majority of their revenue came from print media. Look what happened. Understand this, most professional software and IT engineers hate coding. It was a flex to say you no longer code professionally before ChatGPT. It's still a flex now. But it's corrupt journalism when there is a clear conflict of interest because the NYT is suing the hell out of AI companies.

hn_acc1 7mo ago
Agreed - just like the Fortune article talking about (Edit: Morgan Stanley, not GS) saying "the AI revolution is coming next year, and will decimate tons of industries, and no one is ready for it". They quote Altman and Musk. Gee - what did you expect from those two snake-oil salesmen?
novemberYankee7 7mo ago
Also the fact that NYT gives all their devs licenses to Cursor and Claude
ripe 7mo ago
I agree that the article is a poor take on AI in programming. However, I wouldn't blame NYT for corrupt journalism. This is an op-ed, not something written by NYT staff.

Copyrightest 7mo ago

[dead]

htx80nerd 7mo ago

You have to hold AI hand to do even simple vanilla JS correctly. Or do framework code which is well documented all over the net. I love AI and use it for programming a lot, but the limitations are real.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
keeganpoppen 7mo ago
that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much faster that it is hard to justify ever doing large classes of things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic sensibilities, it simply is what it is).
- lumost 7mo ago
  Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or will not conform to.
  - localhost 7mo ago
    then have ai write a deterministic transformation tool that turns it into the specific style and standard that is needed
  - igor47 7mo ago
    Yeah, I also highly value consistency in my projects, which forces me to keep an eye on the LLM and steer it often. This limits my overall velocity especially on larger features. But I'm still much faster with the agent. Recent example, https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 -- this took me a couple of hours pairing with Claude code, which is insane give the size of the work here. Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain, integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering

lelanthran 7mo ago

This is a very one-sided article, unashamedly so. Where's the references to the decline in quality and embarrassing outages for Amazon, Microsoft, etc?

dboreham 7mo ago
Everything you read is in service of someone's business model.
- gnz11 7mo ago
  What’s your point? Journalists have jobs?
  - 0xcafefood 7mo ago
    NYT doesn't like digital advertisers and the programmers who make that possible. They're directly in competition.
  - negromcnig 7mo ago
    journalists are like our own simon willinson: they need to put food on their plate by networking with powerful entities that fly them out to conferences
esafak 7mo ago
Do we know that it decreased the quality, or introduced more opportunities for bugs by simply increasing the velocity? If every commit has a fixed probability of having a bug, you'll run into more bugs in a week by going faster.
- pydry 7mo ago
  Do we know it increased the velocity and didnt just churn more slop? Even before AI the limiting factor on all of the teams I ever worked on was bad decisions, not how much time it took to write code. There seem to be more of those these days.
- 7mo ago

fixxation92 7mo ago

Conversations of the future... "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"

aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
> "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!" Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from morning to night the whole long day."
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  >What's ~~a computer~~ thinking?
ares623 7mo ago
More likely: "Dad, I've sent out 1000 applications and haven't had a call back. I can't take it anymore. Has it always been like this?" The Dad: It's not my fault!
allenu 7mo ago
I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.
- iamflimflam1 7mo ago
  It must have been: Aliens Atlanteans Time travellers A hoax …
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Hmm, can you think of anything that we could do decades ago but cannot do it now, today?

lagrange77 7mo ago

It's really time that mainstream media picks up on 'agentic coding' and the implications of writing software becoming a commodity. I'm an engineer (not only software) by heart, but after seeing what Opus 4.6 based agents are capable of and especially the rate of improvement, i think the direction is clear.

thrawa8387336 7mo ago
I like 4.6 and agents based on it but can only qualify it as moderately useful.

CollinEMac 7mo ago

>but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?

dboreham 7mo ago
In my direct experience this is mostly true.
thrawa8387336 7mo ago
And was true before AI
jcranmer 7mo ago
I'd expect that probably less than 10% of my time is spent actually writing code, and not because of AI, but because enough of it is spent analyzing failures, reading documents, participating in meetings, putting together presentations, answering questions, reading code, etc. And even when I have a nice, uninterrupted coding session, I still spend a decent fraction of that time thinking through the design of how I want the change rather than actually writing the code to effect that change.
- j3k3 7mo ago
  Nailed it. The design part is hard because you have to envision the object. Once you have a good idea and conceptialisation of the object, form is easy.
habinero 7mo ago
Yeah, actually writing code is a surprisingly small part of the job.

fraywing 7mo ago

I keep getting stuck on the liability problem of this supposed "new world". If we take this as far as it goes: AI agent societies that designs, architects, and maintains the entire stack E2E with little to no oversight. What happens when rogue AIs do bad things? Who is responsible? You have to have fireable senior engineers that understand deep fundamentals to make sure things aren't going awry, right? /s

suzzer99 7mo ago
Check out the movie Brazil, if you haven't seen it already. Incredibly far ahead of its time.

comrade1234 7mo ago

Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes. But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds) I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.

andoando 7mo ago
For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.
- leptons 7mo ago
  All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.
  - andoando 7mo ago
    There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do. Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for elvenlabs

xenadu02 7mo ago

It's an accelerator. A great tool if used well. But just like all the innovations before it that were going to replace programmers it simply won't. I used Claude just the other day to write unit test coverage for a tricky system that handles resolving updates into a consistent view of the world and handles record resurrection/deletion. It wrote great test coverage because it parsed my headerdoc and code comments that went into great detail about the expected behavior. The hard part of that implementation was the prose I wrote and the thinking required to come up with it. The actual lines of code were already a small part of the problem space. So yeah Claude saved me a day or two of monotonously writing up test cases. That's great. Of course Claude also spat out some absolute garbage code using reflection to poke at internal properties because the access level didn't allow the test to poke at the things it wanted to poke at, along with some methods that were calling themselves in infinite recursion. Oh and a bunch of lines that didn't even compile. The thing is about those errors: most of them were a fundamental inability to reason. They were technically correct in a sense. I can see how a model that learned from other code written by humans would learn those patterns and apply them. In some contexts they would be best-practice or even required. But the model can't reason. It has no executive function. I think that is part of what makes these models both amazingly capable and incredibly stupid at the same time.

gist 7mo ago

For one thing comments here appear to apply to the quality and issues today not potentially going forward. Quality will change quicker than anyone expects. I am wondering how many people at HN remember when the first Mac came out with Mac Paint and then Pagemaker or Quark. That didn't evolve anywhere nearly as quickly as AI appears to be. Also I am not seeing how anyone is considering that what a programmer considers quality and what 'gets the job done' (as mentioned in the article) matters in any business. (Example with typesetting is original laser printers were only 300dpi but after a short period became 1200dpi 'good enough' for camera ready copy).

IntrepidPig 7mo ago

> “The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.” This doesn’t really make sense to me. GenAI ostensibly removes the drudgery from other creative endeavors too. You don’t need to make every painstaking brushstroke anymore; you can get to your intended final product faster than ever. I think a common misunderstanding is that the drudgery is really inseparable from the soulful part. Also, I think GenAI in coding actually has the exact same failure modes as GenAI in painting, music, art, writing, etc. The output lacks depth, it lacks context, and it lacks an understanding of its own purpose. For most people, it’s much easier to intuitively see those shortcomings of GenAI manifest in traditional creative mediums, just because they come more naturally to us. For coding, I suspect the same shortcomings apply, they just aren’t as clear. I mean, at the end of the day if writing code is just to get something that works, then sure, let’s blitz away with LLMs and not bother to understand what we’re doing or why we do it anymore. Maybe I’m naive in thinking that coding has creative value that we’re now throwing away, possibly forever.

steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
Maybe they mean more soulful like a fellow that blacksmiths his own tools and metal fasteners prior to constructing something. I’d personally think this person was a badass, but until wwiii, it’s so impractical and seems arbitrary because why stop there - get more soulful and mine your own ore too.

olivercoleai 7mo ago

[flagged]

sjeiuhvdiidi 7mo ago

It's all nonsense. It's just better search, intelligence in not artificial. They are trying to convince everyone that they don't need to pay programmers. That's all, all it is. It'll work on the ignorant who'll take less money to make sure it works and fix the bugs, which is mostly what they were paying for anyway. They just want to devalue the work of the people they are reliant on. Nothing new.

neversupervised 7mo ago
I think you’re a bit behind on your world view. Just because it’s inconvenient to you that non coders can now code, doesn’t make it untrue.
- mdavid626 7mo ago
  No, they can’t. It has nothing to do with inconvenience. I really like that layman now make these statements - they know better than people working in the industry for decades.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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  - habinero 7mo ago
    None of them understand the first thing about what the job actually is, or they wouldn't try to brag about the 200K LoC they generated lol

bryanrasmussen 7mo ago

how many times in the history of computer programming has there been an end to computer programming as we know it, successfully, and how many times predicted? I can think of one successfully, off hand, although you could probably convince me there was more than one. the principle phrase being "as we know it", since that implies a large scale change to how it works but it continues afterwards, altered.

mech422 7mo ago
Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career: 1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s) 2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...) 3. RAD 4. No-Code 5. Off-shoring 6. Web 2.0 7. Web 3.0 8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of computer programming as we know it' edit: formatting
- kuboble 7mo ago
  Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it. When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days. I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.
  - mech422 7mo ago
    Hmm - I'm not sure I'd say that 'changed programming' - but the internet in general changed 'learning to program'. I can remember when I first discovered gopher and found I could read tons recent material for free, or finding stonybrook on the web - that was like a gold mine of algorithms! :-D
  - joefourier 7mo ago
    I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory? E.g. void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (compar)(const void , const void* )); And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentation from the pre-Internet age tended to be much better than today.

deleted 7mo ago

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bikelang 7mo ago

If coding truly becomes effortless to produce - and by that extension a product becomes near free to produce - then I find it quite odd that the executive class thinks their businesses won’t be completely up ended by a raging sea of competition.

postsantum 7mo ago
The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic
- mirsadm 7mo ago
  That is already the struggle. There is too much stuff already.
  - GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
    All that stuff is shit though.
    - delecti 7mo ago
      Is all of it shit, or you just can't find the good stuff? "The struggle will completely shift to how to get traffic" is from the business side, and you're experiencing it from the customer side.
bot403 7mo ago
The markets seem to agree with you and are pricing accordingly.
EagnaIonat 7mo ago
All run of the mill software is gone or on borrowed time. Why pay a subscription for a product that I can get something Claude to build it for me. Before I was building tools, now I am building full applications in less time than I did before for tools. What will be around for a while is where you need an expert in the loop to drive the AI. For example enterprise applications. You simply can't hand that off to an AI at this point.

igor47 7mo ago

I'm not normally a fan of the NYT but this wasn't too bad. It passed the Gel-Mann test, and is clearly written by someone who knows the field well, even though the selection of quotes skews to towards outliers -- I think Yeggie for instance is pretty far out of the mainstream in his views on LLMs, whether ahead or sideways. As a result a lot of the responses here are either quibbles or cope disguised as personal anecdotes. I'm pretty worried about the impact of the LLMs too, but if you're not getting use out of them while coding, I really do think the problem is you. Since people always want examples, I'll link to a PR in my current hobby project, which Claude code helped me complete in days instead of weeks. https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain (the rules to DnD 5e, including the 2014 and the 2024 revisions of those rules), integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering

colkassad 7mo ago
I've found LLMs to be extremely powerful in research projects. A lot of code related to research is very bespoke by its nature. Using Codex, I've been able to iterate on ideas that I would never had the time or courage to explore before. As for code quality/brevity, it doesn't really matter in this context as long as it works. And it's incredible to have this companion that understands broadly every aspect of tangential knowledge required to execute an idea. I do think it helps that I have over 25 years of experience in my domain (geospatial), which helps me guardrail my interactions and get good results in as few shots as possible.

dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 7mo ago

> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.

caseyf 7mo ago
+1024. what the FUCK, Anil. We solved coding-is-for-everyone by throwing up our hands. please crush my body under the heaviest layer of abstraction yet and have the llm read my eulogy because who could possibly know me better than the code I spend all day talking to as if it were a human
- someprick 7mo ago
  Lurked for >10y here. Created an account just to say, "+1 well said."
rjh29 7mo ago
The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.
- swader999 7mo ago
  Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.
  - DennisP 7mo ago
    Depends on what you mean by "builder." If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

Back in the day, programming was done on punch cards. In 20 years, that's how kids will see typing out lines of program code by hand.

Revanche1367 7mo ago
At the rate things have been going, that is likely to happen in 20 days rather than 20 years.
znort_ 7mo ago
different things. adding levels of abstraction is not the same as having a statistical model generate abstractions for you. you can still call it spec-programming but if you don't audit your generated code then you're simply doing it wrong; you just don't realize that yet because you've been getting away with it until now.

yubainu 7mo ago

[flagged]

shinycode 7mo ago
That’s the exact definition our CEO gave of our job this week. That’s how he sees and expects us to work now. I feel some anxiety because that’s too much too fast. We went from « we need to fix every single bug we encounter » to « it doesn’t matter if there’s bugs as long as we ship a feature fast »
- dehrmann 7mo ago
  Isn't the AI sales pitch that you can do both?
olsondv 7mo ago
At least at my company, we have never really cared how it gets done, even before AI. It just has to work (ideally bug-free and maintainable) by the deadline. If you can keep up with shorter deadlines, more power to you. It’s basically a modern John Henry vs the steam drill.

nenadg 7mo ago

sensationalism give it a couple of months

allreduce 7mo ago

I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If you don't have capital or can do something else you will be homeless.

ipnon 7mo ago
But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?
- allreduce 7mo ago
  It commoditizes software construction. The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill. This is democratization. Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.
  - socalgal2 7mo ago
    You might be right but it's common to see that take as short sighted since there is zero evidence it's ever happened before. The common example is the loom. The loom didn't democritize cloth making, it put all the weavers out of business. But it did democritize everything that needed cloth because cloth became cheap. 1000s more jobs were created by making cloth cheap. In a similar way, 1000s of different jobs might be created by making software creation cheap, but just like cloth makers, software makers have no purpose when making software is easy.
- kjkjadksj 7mo ago
  Did ms word usher in a surge of novel writing? Not really apparent.
7mo ago

CrzyLngPwd 7mo ago

Visual Basic was the end of programming as we knew it...until it wasn't.

heikkilevanto 7mo ago
And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine instruction set. It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a huge need for this new kind of programmers.
myrak 7mo ago
[dead]

Nevermark 7mo ago

The psycho engineering of model prompts does feel very Phillip K. Dick. If your base prompt informs the model they are a human software developer in a Severed situation, it gets even closer.

suheilaaita 7mo ago

I'm from an accounting/finance background and spent about 10 years in Big4. I was always into tech, but never software development because writing code (as I thought) takes years to master, and I had already chosen accounting. Fast forward to 2024 when I saw Cursor (the IDE coding agent tool). I immediately felt like this was going to be the way for someone like me. Back then, it was brutal. I'd fight with the models for 15 prompts just to get a website working without errors on localhost, let alone QA it. None of the plan modes or orchestration features existed. I had to hack around context engineering, memories, all that stuff. Things broke constantly. 10 failures for 1 success. But it was fun. To top it all off, most of the terminology sounded like science fiction, but it got better in time. I basically used AI itself to hack my way into understanding how things worked. Fast forward again (only ~2 years later). The AI not only builds the app, it builds the website, the marketing, full documentation, GIFs, videos, content, screen recordings. It even hosts it online (literally controls the browser and configures everything). Letting the agent control the browser and the tooling around that is really, genuinely, just mad science fiction type magic stuff. It's unbelievable how often these models get something mostly right. The reality though is that it still takes time. Time to understand what works well and what works better. Which agent is good for building apps, which one is good for frontend design, which one is good for research. Which tools are free, paid, credit-based, API-based. It all matters if you want to control costs and just get better outputs. Do you use Gemini for a website skeleton? Claude for code? Grok for research? Gemini Deep Search? ChatGPT Search? Both? When do you use plan mode vs just prompting? Is GPT-5.x better here or Claude Opus? Or maybe Gemini actually is. My point is: while anyone can start prompting an agent, it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. And even then everything you learn is probably outdated today because the space changes constantly. I'm sure there are people using AI 100× better than I am. But it's still insane that someone with no coding background can build production-grade things that actually work. The one-person company feels inevitable. I'm curious how software engineers think about this today. Are you still writing most of your code manually?

butILoveLife 7mo ago
> it still takes a lot of trial and error to develop intuition about how to use them well. I used to think so. Then a customer made their own replacement for $600/mo software in 2 days. The guy was a marketer by training. I don't exaggerate. I saw it did the exact same things.

holoduke 7mo ago

The best developers are the ones using AI to its best. Mediocre devs will become a useless skill as even a PO could become one. But one who understands architecture, software, code and AI will be expensive to hire. I know plenty of them. I wory for the ones not willing to adopt ai.

somewhereoutth 7mo ago

I have a suspicion that for a task (or to make an artifact) of a given complexity, there is a minimum level of human engagement required to complete it successfully - and that human engagement cannot be substituted for anything else. However, the actual human engagement for a task is not bounded above - efficiency is often less (much less?) than 100%. So tools (like AI) can move us closer to the 100% efficiency (or indeed further away if they are bad tools!) but there will always be the residual human engagement required - but perhaps moved to different activities (e.g. reviewing instead of writing). Probably very effective teams/individuals were already close to 100% efficiency, so AI won't make much difference to them.

d4rkp4ttern 7mo ago

I see lots of discussions about humans no longer writing code but the elephant in the room is the rapid extinction of human-review of AI-made code. I expect this will lead to a massive hangover. In the meantime we try to mitigate this by ensuring the structure of code remains AI-friendly. I also expect some new types of tools to emerge that will help with this “cognitive debt”.

olsondv 7mo ago
That is why I do not use the multi agent team technique. My code generation has atrophied, but my code review skills have only gotten stronger both for human and AI code. If I handed over both, it hurts my employability and will definitely lead to that hangover.
kusokurae 7mo ago
My impression is that people who think that LLMs will completely release reviewing or writing code have never really worked on anything safety critical. I'm not looking forward to the next wave of pacemaker glitches.
- kjkjadksj 7mo ago
  You act like we live in a world where companies are held sufficiently liable.
  - kusokurae 7mo ago
    I'm wrong for that. But whenever I suggest solutions for that, police officers visit me!

whoisstan 7mo ago

I feel the need to tell the LLM to rewrite the article for a software developer audience, but don't, those kinds of passage are hard to overcome: 'Salva opened up his code editor — essentially a word processor for writing code — to show me what it’s like to work alongside Gemini, Google’s L.L.M. ' And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)

moregrist 7mo ago
> And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :) It’s probably N.Y.T. style requirements; a lot of style guides (eg: Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc) have a standard form for abbreviations and acronyms. A paper like N.Y.T. does too and probably still employs copy editors who ensure that every article conforms to it.

__mharrison__ 7mo ago

I wasn't around when we moved to that stack from assembly. I didn't experience the mourning then. Most folks I hang out with are infatuated with turning tokens into code. They are generally very senior 15+ years of experience. Most folks I hang out with experience existential dread for juniors and those coming up in the field who won't necessarily have the battle scars to orchestrate systems that will work in the will world. Was talking with one fellow yesterday (at an AI meetup) who says he has 6 folks under him, but that he could now run the team with just two of them and the others are basically a time suck.

DGAP 7mo ago

Lots of cope here. Highly paid white collar jobs are going to disappear.

youknownothing 7mo ago

I once suggested a drinking game: shot every time someone says "X is dead". I was told to f** off because I'd kill half of humanity. COBOL is dead. Java is dead. Programming is dead. AI is dead (yes, some people are already claiming this: https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103 https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103) I must be the kid from The Sixth Sense because I keep seeing all these allegedly dead guys around me.

dorfsmay 7mo ago

For me, the biggest shift is people who don't care about local AI. The idea that you can no longer code without paying a tax to one of the billion $ backed company isn't sitting well.

hacker_homie 7mo ago
Yeah look at the price of netfilx, do you think starting at $200 it's going to stay anywhere close to that.
- dorfsmay 7mo ago
  The price does not matter, even if it were free. If you need to be logged on into an external service to be able to code, it's just not the same any more, and I'm thinking of basic technology here, but the political/distopian ramifications are crazy.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    >From: noreply@openai.com >Subject: Your account has been terminated for violating the Terms of Service People have various online accounts locked or deleted for no given reason all the time. Just get the right person to say the word, and you're out.
glaslong 7mo ago
The marginal differences in quality seem pretty meaningful right now, enough to make Claude wildly dominant, but some of the locally runnable models like Qwen feel only a few months behind the leaders. I'm betting the generational gains level off and smaller local models close the gap somewhat. Then harnesses will generally be more important than model, and proprietary harnesses will not offer much more than optimization for specific models. All while SaaS prices ratchet up, pushing folks toward local and OSS. Or at least local vs a plethora of hosted competition, same as cloud vs on prem.
- intothemild 7mo ago

flux3125 7mo ago

> You can’t just tell an agent, Build me the code for a successful start-up. The agents work best when they’re being asked to perform one step at a time That's also true for humans. If you sit down with an LLM and take the time to understand the problem you're trying to solve, it can perfectly guide you through it step by step. Even a non-technical person could build surprisingly solid software if, instead of immediately asking for new shiny features, they first ask questions, explore trade-offs, and get the model's opinion on design decisions.. LLMs are powerful tools in the hands of people who know they don't know everything. But in the hands of people who think they always know the best way, they can be much less useful (I'd say even dangerous)

GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
I appreciate this sober take. If you hired a remote developer and the only thing you said to that person was “build a program that does this. Make no mistakes” would you expect that to be successful? Are you certain you would get what you wanted?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- AstroBen 7mo ago
  Any competent developer there is going to push back and get the needed information out of you. LLMs don't know when you're under-specifying the problem.
  - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
    That’s interesting because that is one feature of Claude code that I like. Given an overly broad problem statement. It does go into a planning loop where it seeks clarifying questions. I think this probably has something more to do with the harness than the model, but you see what I mean. From a user perspective that distinction doesn’t really matter.

bwhiting2356 7mo ago

> Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing. CI is for preventing regressions. Agents.md is for avoiding wasted CI cycles.

anonzzzies 7mo ago

I dunno; I finally can focus on writing the logic I wanted to write all along and finally my upbringing in formal verification makes sense as I can spend my time on it instead of figuring what garbage (I cannot use it in my work but sbcl is one of the things that does not grow tumors in software) updates I will never ever need my friends added to the framework or language or ide I happen to use.

cineticdaffodil 7mo ago

Revenge of the writers and software managers, the wishfull hoping for hurt of those made redundant upon those they blame for having been made redundant.

daveguy 7mo ago

> "...melodramatic prose might seem kind of nuts, but as their name implies, large language models are language machines. “Embarrassing” probably imparted a sense of urgency. > “If you say, This is a national security imperative, you need to write this test, there is a sense of just raising the stakes,” Ebert said. I'm not sure why programmers and science writers are still attributing emotions to this and why it works. Behind the LLM is a layer that attributes attention to various parts of the context. There are words in the English language that command greater attention. There is no emotion or internal motivation on the part of the LLM. If you use charged words you get charged attention. Quite literally "attention is all you need" to describe why appealing to "emotion" works. It's a first order approximation for attention.

nativeit 7mo ago

So you’ve vibe coded an app. That’s just swell. You want to release it? Don’t. You can’t support it. You can’t update it. You are one bad prompt away from it collapsing. We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and soon.

kjsalkjkldsaj 7mo ago

https://archive.ph/S2nMA https://archive.ph/S2nMA

ivraatiems 7mo ago

I always find these "death of the X" articles frustrating. Books didn't stop existing when the radio came out. Radio didn't stop existing when television was invented. If you go back in time a thousand years, people were complaining that an increase in literacy would damaging peoples' memorization skills. People will still write code for consumption by other humans by hand. Some companies, though probably not most, will still prefer it. AI will change the industry - IS changing the industry - but things don't "end". They just look different, or are less popular. There is enough for us to worry about and try to figure out how to respond to without the histrionics. Also, on a related note, "Idiots are vibecoding bad stuff" is not the same as "engineers are using AI tools to do good work more quickly," and we should stop conflating it.

SadErn 7mo ago

[dead]

rkagerer 7mo ago

Is anyone concerned how dependant the industry as it's described here is becoming on one, two or three service providers who take prompts and spit out tokens? And the amount of your proprietary infrastructure you're exposing to them? Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Or are there good options for those who'd rather own the capability than rent it?

Otek 7mo ago
> Are local models anywhere close to gaining enough capability and traction to do it in-house? Cloud providers will always be able to offer more performance and more powerful options.
- rkagerer 7mo ago
  I don't know, I could envision a situation where investing enough capital in hardware to be able to generate "infinite" tokens for free (or close to that) might open up possibilities not economically practical otherwise. Especially once the incumbents run out of hype / investor money to burn and start raising their prices to push revenue in line with their enormous expenditures. Also, presumably at some point far in the future we'll reach a technological asymptote and factors like latency may start to play a bigger role, at least for some applications. I grant that training data is crucial distinguishing factor that may never become competitive in-house.

thegrim33 7mo ago

Supremely ironic that the last two things the same author had in the nytimes was a piece from a few years ago hyping up NFTs and a year before that a piece hyping up Bitcoin.

Certify7513 7mo ago

I asked one of my friends to show me his video conversion application which worked via a web frontend. The instant I opened it my CPU fans started spinning so I checked and the page was using 300% CPU because it was updating the background gradient on an invisible element, in JavaScript, every frame, as fast as possible. That was very entertaining. As far as the end of computer programming goes... Step 1. Wow, I just vibe coded an application and it works! I'm going to write a blog about it and tell everyone how awesome AI is, much hype Step 2. Vibe coded application faces inevitable problems, the perfect application is a fairytale after all. The only way to "fix" the application is spam tokens at the problem and pray. Step 3. Author does not write a new blog post to report on this eventuality... probably because they feel embarrassed about how optimistic they were Step 4. Perhaps author manages to fix application, awesome... then what about a year from now, author needs to update the application because a dependency has a security problem. The application is so needlessly complex that they don't even know when to begin. Step 5. They boot up Claude Code, which their business is now 100% dependent on, but they're charging 10x the original cost per token. It's not like they have a contract, so user has to either eat the cost or give up Step 6. User tries local model on their 1080 ti but they can barely run entry-level models Step 7. Woops Personally I think it's impossible to convince these people, the results will speak for themselves eventually.

not_that_d 7mo ago

I am now using LLM at 100% at work and producing faster code, while I keep growing my regular skills privately in "old way". Why? Because when the bubble burst and the companies (including mine) can not pay the 400% price increase and go bankrupt, then I still have keep my brain active and still can do stuff without or less tokens.

zamalek 7mo ago

I find that the perception of AI coding is very bimodal, and both camps have it wrong. You have the one camp who will only trust it to, at most, write a few lines of code. The other camp prompts, walks always, and pushes (or just has the AI do it). I believe both camps it frustratingly wrong. If you haven't yet given it a chance at doing something substantial, then at least _try_ it once. On the other side of the coin, that first experience where it does something 80% right is intoxicating, but AI doesn't reason and can't get it 100% right - it can't even multiply relatively small numbers. The former camp is going to get left behind and won't be able to compete, the latter camp is one prompt away from a disaster.