16 ms·

Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

611 points by stevekrouse 6mo ago

developic 6mo ago
[flagged]
rvz 6mo ago
From "code" to "no-code" to "vibe coding" and back to "code". What you are seeing here is that many are attempting to take shortcuts to building production-grade maintainable software with AI and now realizing that they have built their software on terrible architecture only to throw it away, rewriting it with now no-one truly understanding the code or can explain it. We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". [0] With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. This is exactly happening to engineers at AWS with Kiro causing outages [1] and now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI). [0] https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cloud-outages-ai-tools-amazon-web-services-aws https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cl... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f77...
- suzzer99 6mo ago
  > With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. I've had to work on multiple legacy systems like this where the original devs are long gone, there's no documentation, and everyone at the company admits it's complete mess. They send you off with a sympathetic, "Good luck, just do the best you can!" I call it "throwing dye in the water." It's the opposite of fun programming. On the other hand, it often takes creativity and general cleverness to get the app to do what you want with minimally-invasive code changes. So it should be the hardest for AI.
- Insanity 6mo ago
  While I agree with everything you said, Amazon’s problems aren’t just Kiro messing up. It’s a brain drain due to layoffs, and then people quitting because of the continuous layoff culture. While publicly they might say this is AI driven, I think that’s mostly BS. Anyway, that doesn’t take away from your point, just adds additional context to the outages.
- zer00eyz 6mo ago
  > We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". > now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI). What does this say about the "code review" process if people cant understand the things they didn't write? Maybe we have had the wrong hiring criteria. The "leet code", brain teaser (FAANG style) write some code interview might not have been the best filter for the sorts of people you need working in your org today. Reading code, tooling up (debuggers, profilers), durable testing (Simulation, not unit) are the skill changes that NO ONE is talking about, and we have not been honing or hiring for. No one is talking about requirements, problem scoping, how you rationalize and think about building things. No one is talking about how your choice of dev environment is going to impact all of the above processes. I see a lot of hype, and a lot of hate, but not a lot of the pragmatic middle.
  - xienze 6mo ago
    > This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". Yeah but that takes years to play out. Now developers are cranking out thousands of lines of “he doesn’t work here anymore” code every day.
    - zer00eyz 6mo ago
      > Yeah but that takes years to play out. https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover has some data, that aligns with my own experience putting the average at 2 years. I have been doing this a long time: my longest running piece of code was 20 years. My current is 10. Most of my code is long dead and replaced because businesses evolve, close, move on. A lot of my code was NEVER ment to be permanent. It solved a problem in a moment, it accomplished a task, fit for purpose and disposable (and riddled with cursing, manual loops and goofy exceptions just to get the job done). Meanwhile I have seen a LOT of god awful code written by humans. Business running on things that are SO BAD that I still have shell shock that they ever worked. AI is just a tool. It's going from hammers to nail guns. The people involved are still the ones who are ultimately accountable.
- andrekandre 6mo ago
  > With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. i have seen this in real-time as we roll out this stuff; its not pretty and its aggravating as a code reviewer when asking "why is this here?" or "what does this part do?" and i cant get a straight answer except "i don't remember exactly"...
deadbabe 6mo ago
My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.
- oooyay 6mo ago
  > I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage of the industry walked away from shift-left greatly more capable than the rest, a larger chunk left the industry entirely, and some people never changed. The same thing will likely happen here. We'll learn a lot of lessons, the Overton window will shift, the world will be different, and it will move on. We'll have new problems and topics to deal with as AI and how to use it shifts away from being a primary topic.
  - oblio 6mo ago
    Shift left? Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...
    - esafak 6mo ago
      It's a security practice. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-security/shift-left-security/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-se...
      - oblio 6mo ago
        I've heard a ton of times about "designing/planning for quality and security from the start", I guess it can't hurt to also have a buzzword for it.
aplomb1026 6mo ago
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soumyaskartha 6mo ago
Every few years something is going to kill code and here we are. The job changes, it does not disappear.
- suzzer99 6mo ago
  For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.
  - drzaiusx11 6mo ago
    This is already happening, many days I am that grumpy "code janitor" yelling at the damn kids to improve their slop after shit blows up in prod. I can tell you It's not "fun", but hopefully we'll converge on a scalable review system eventually that doesn't rely on a few "olds" to clean up. GenAI systems produce a lot of "mostly ok" code that has subtle issues you on catch with some experience. Maybe I should just retire a few years early and go back to fixing cars...
    - suzzer99 6mo ago
      Yeah I imagine it has to be utterly thankless being the code janitor right now when all the hype around AI is peaking. You're basically just the grumpy troll slowing things down. And God forbid you introduce a regression bug trying to clean up some AI slop code. Maybe in the future us olds will get more credit when apps fall over and the higher ups realize they actually need a high-powered cleaner/fixer, like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction.
      - allthetime 6mo ago
        I’ve got a “I haven’t written a line of code in one year” buddy whose startup is gaining traction and contracts. He’s rewritten the whole stack twice already after hitting performance issues and is now hiring cheap juniors to clean up the things he generates. It is all relatively well defined CRUD that he’s just slapped a bunch of JS libs on top of that works well enough to sell, but I’m curious to see the long term effects of these decisions. Meanwhile I’m moving at about half the speed with a more hands on approach (still using the bots obviously) but my code quality and output are miles ahead of where I was last year without sacrificing maintain ability and performance for dev speed
erichocean 6mo ago
> If you know of any other snippet of code that can master all that complexity as beautifully, I'd love to see it. Electric Clojure: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.two-clocks$TwoClocks https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...
- stevekrouse 6mo ago
  Sick!!! Great example! I'm actually a longtime friend and angel investor in Dustin but I hadn't seen this
idopmstuff 6mo ago
I don't know that people are saying code is dead (or at least the ones who have even a vague understanding of AI's role) - more that humans are moving up a level of abstraction in their inputs. Rather than writing code, they can write specs in English and have AI write the code, much in the same way that humans moved from writing assembly to writing higher-level code. But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. There are probably a lot of cases where you could write an instruction unambiguously in English, but it'd end up being much longer because English is much less precise than any coding language. I think we'll see the same in photo and video editing as AI gets better at that. If I need to make a change to a photo, I'll be able to ask a computer, and it'll be able to do it. But if I need the change to be pixel-perfect, it'll be much more efficient to just do it in Photoshop than to describe the change in English. But much like with photo editing, there'll be a lot of cases where you just don't need a high enough level of specificity to use a coding language. I build tools for myself using AI, and as long as they do what I expect them to do, they're fine. Code's probably not the best, but that just doesn't matter for my case. (There are of course also issues of code quality, tech debt, etc., but I think that as AI gets better and better over the next few years, it'll be able to write reliable, secure, production-grade code better than humans anyway.)
- cactusplant7374 6mo ago
  > But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. Unless the defect rate for humans is greater than LLMs at some point. A lot of claims are being made about hallucinations that seem to ignore that all software is extremely buggy. I can't use my phone without encountering a few bugs every day.
  - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though, not by just making something up to leap to the conclusion considered most probable, so not sure if the comparison makes sense.
lucasay 6mo ago
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pacman128 6mo ago
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  That’s factually untrue. I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on, doing things no one’s ever done with them, and I know this because I ecosystem around these young frameworks. Models can RTFM (and code) and do novel things, demonstrably so.
  - allthetime 6mo ago
    Yeah. I work with bleeding edge zig. If you just ask Claude to write you a working tcp server with the new Io api, it doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing and the code doesn’t compile. But if you give it some minimal code examples, point it to the recent blog posts about it, and paste in relevant points from std it does incredibly well and produce code that it has not been trained on.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
      It’s always been about context, then being able to communicate it. Manager people or managing a hyper-knowledgeable intern (LLM). If you know what you need, actually want what you want (super difficult), and have the ability to provide context to someone else… management has always been easier for you than others. I find one of the more interesting things about the current “AI debate” is that many programmers are autistic or at least close one side of an empathetic spectrum that they’ve always had trouble communicating what is needed for a task and why. So it’s hard for me to take the opinions going around.
    - qweiopqweiop 6mo ago
      It also needs a validation loop. Give it the compiler output and I bet it would fix that code even without examples/a blog post.
gedy 6mo ago
When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs... I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?". I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less code to understand. I'm feeling the same vibe these days with the "isn't it great?". Not really!
- justonceokay 6mo ago
  You just brought me back to my first internship where as interns we were asked to hand-manipulate a 30k lines auto-generated SOAP API definition because we lost the license to the software that generated it
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  Oh the memories, but at least that generated code was deterministic...
- bitwize 6mo ago
  I remember the first time trying to work with MFC. I was aghast at all the generated garbage the IDE produced. But I guess if you're a drone working in an insurance company somewhere, you don't want to have to deal with message loops, window classes, WinMain, and all that, so you would welcome all that stuff just being handled for you while you just filled in the application-specific code. To me, that was the fun part of programming against the Windows API. And it was gonna come bite you anyway, so in for a penny... Extrapolate to the present day with LLM-generated code. I'm sure you're not far off the actual mark.
Plutarco_ink 6mo ago
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rglover 6mo ago
It's only dead to those who are ignorant to what it takes to build and run real systems that don't tip over all the time (or leak data, embroil you in extortion, etc). That will piss some people off but it's worth considering if you don't want to perma-railroad yourself long-term. Many seem to be so blinded by the glitz, glamour, and dollar signs that they don't realize they're actively destroying their future prospects/reputation by getting all emo about a non-deterministic printer. Valuable? Yep. World changing? Absolutely. The domain of people who haven't the slightest clue what they're doing? Not unless you enjoy lighting money on fire.
- derrak 6mo ago
  > non-deterministic printer. I interpret non-deterministic here as “an LLM will not produce the same output on the same input.” This is a) not true and b) not actually a problem. a) LLMs are functions and appearances otherwise are due to how we use them b) lots of traditional technologies which have none of the problems of LLMs are non-deterministic. E.g., symbolic non-deterministic algorithms. Non-determinism isn’t the problem with LLMs. The problem is that there is no formal relationship between the input and output.
cratermoon 6mo ago
Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt."
- woeirua 6mo ago
  Djikstra wasn’t a god. He’s going to be wrong on this one.
  - bigstrat2003 6mo ago
    He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
    - esafak 6mo ago
      How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.
      - Capricorn2481 6mo ago
        Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.
        esafak 6mo ago
        Go on. How, in this context?
deleted 6mo ago
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picafrost 6mo ago
So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible. Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.
- oblio 6mo ago
  Those are business goals that don't just go away because tech changes.
  - picafrost 6mo ago
    Of course. But LLMs may subtract the need for top talent to be working on them.
  - fritzo 6mo ago
    Those business goals will soon realize they need more electricity. More brains will be devoted to power generation.
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    Likely, but through regulation, not AI
flitzofolov 6mo ago
r0ml's third law states that: “Any distributed system based on exchanging data will be replaced by a system based on exchanging programs.” I believe the same pattern is inevitable for these higher level abstractions and interfaces to generate computer instructions. The language use must ultimately conform to a rigid syntax, and produce a deterministic result, a.k.a. "code". Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5fmhYc4U-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5fmhYc4U-Y
- internet_points 6mo ago
  > “Any distributed system based on exchanging data will be replaced by a system based on exchanging programs.” So distributed systems tend to converge towards being more and more mystifying? Cf. the mythical mammoth: > Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.
lateforwork 6mo ago
Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI systems are trained on vast bodies of human work and generate answers near the center of existing thought. A human might occasionally step back and question conventional wisdom, but AI systems do not do this on their own. They align with consensus rather than challenge it. As a result, they cannot independently push knowledge forward. Humans can innovate with help from AI, but AI still requires human direction. You can prod AI systems to think critically, but they tend to revert to the mean. When a conversation moves away from consensus thinking, you can feel the system pulling back toward the safe middle. As Apple’s “Think Different” campaign in the late 90s put it: the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do—the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently. AI is none of that. AI is a conformist. That is its strength, and that is its weakness. [1] https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-reveals-about-the-future-of-software https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
- thesz 6mo ago
  > ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of accuracy. These theorems provide a mathematical justification for using neural networks, assuring researchers that a sufficiently large or deep network can model the complex, non-linear relationships often found in real-world data." And then: "Notice also that the neural network is only required to approximate within a compact set K {\displaystyle K}. The proof does not describe how the function would be extrapolated outside of the region." NNs, LLMs included, are interpolators, not extrapolators. And the region NN approximates within can be quite complex and not easily defined as "X:R^N drawn from N(c,s)^N" as SolidGoldMagiKarp [2] clearly shows. [2] https://github.com/NiluK/SolidGoldMagikarp https://github.com/NiluK/SolidGoldMagikarp
cratermoon 6mo ago
I can't tell if the author's "when we get AGI" is sarcasm or genuine.
- stevekrouse 6mo ago
  Genuine!
woeirua 6mo ago
The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than a year. Anyone who thinks AGI is far away deserves to be blindsided.
- anematode 6mo ago
  In agree in principle, but the compiler is a terrible example given the amount of scaffolding afforded to the LLMs, literally hundreds of thousands of test cases covering all kinds of esoteric corners. Also (and this is coming from someone who thinks it's quite close) "AGI" is not implied by the ability to implement very-long-horizon software tasks. That's not "general" at all.
  - woeirua 6mo ago
    You're moving the goal posts. A year ago, _no one_ thought it could write a working compiler. Yes, the compilers we've seen today are not great. Yes, they rely too much on existing implementations. But... if you can't see which way the wind is blowing then I can't help you at this point. AGI is a meaningless milestone. No one can actually define it. The best definition I've seen is the one that ARC is using: "AI that is as good at a human at every task".
    - anematode 6mo ago
      What goal posts have I moved? You seem to be attributing arguments to me that I haven't made. I'm simply pointing out that the example you gave involves a level of scaffolding that most projects don't have, so that the data point is exaggerated; and that it's possible (and quite reasonable) to have an agent that is extremely good at programming while not matching what most companies and people in the space have defined as "AGI". I do believe that we'll soon have agents that can achieve Claude C Compiler–level achievements in spaces with far less scaffolding.
jee599 6mo ago
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bluGill 6mo ago
A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wouldn't have any innovations as the space is already well covered. Where I'm different from other compilers is more likely a case of I did something stupid that someone who knows how to write a compiler wouldn't.
- lateforwork 6mo ago
  > as the space is already well covered The US patent commissioner in 1899 wanted to shutdown the patent office because "everything that can be invented has been invented." And yet, human ingenuity keeps proving otherwise.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    There are lots of small innovations left. Only a few patents have ever been for revolutions. Small innovaions add up to big things.
  - appletrotter 6mo ago
    This is apocraphyl :(
- 3836293648 6mo ago
  You could probably do it in a few days, C is not that hard to compile
  - lateforwork 6mo ago
    Right, and that was a design goal of C language... to be close to the machine.
    - 3836293648 6mo ago
pjmlp 6mo ago
This is coping, with tools like Boomi, n8n, Langflow, and similar, there are plenty of automated tasks that can already be configured and that's it.
randcraw 6mo ago
Krouse points to a great article by Simon Willison who proposes that the killer role for vibe coding (hopefully) will be to make code better and not just faster. By generating prototypes that are based on different design models each end product can be assessed for specific criteria like code readability, reliability, or fault tolerance and then quickly be revised repeatedly to serve these ends better. No longer would the victory dance of vibe coding be simply "It ran!" or "Look how quickly I built it!".
- roxolotl 6mo ago
  This is my hope as well. We now have time to write things a bit better. Comment on the pr with a quick improvement and it can just happen. But I’m failing to convince people at work. The majority seem to just be happy for code to go away and for us to never think about it again.
_pdp_ 6mo ago
Remember Deep Thought, the greatest computer ever built that spent 7.5 million years computing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? The answer was 42, perfectly correct, utterly useless because nobody understood the question they were asking. That's what happens when you hand everything to a machine without understanding the problem yourself. AI can give you correct answers all day long, but if you don't understand what you're building, you'll end up just like the people of Magrathea, staring at 42 and wondering what to do with it. True understanding is indistinguishable from doing.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  Well, yes, but AI can also give you wildly incorrect answers with alarming frequency. I know, I know, "skill issue"/"you're holding it wrong". And maybe that's vacuously true, in that it's so hard to guess what will produce correct output, because LLMs are not an abstraction layer in the way that we're used to. Prior abstraction layers related input to output via a transparent homomorphism: the output produced for an input was knowable and relatively straightforward (even with exotic optimization flags). LLMs are not like that. Your input disappears into a maze of twisty little matmuls, all alike (a different maze per run, for the same input!) and you can't relate what comes out the other end in terms of the input except in terms of "vibes". So to get a particular output, you just have to guess how to prompt it, and it is not very helpful if you guess wrong except in providing a wrong (often very subtly so) response! Back in the day, I had a very primitive, rinky-dink computer—a VIC-20. The VIC-20 came with one of the best "intro to programming" guides a kid could ask for. Regarding error messages it said something like this: "If your VIC-20 tells you something like ?SYNTAX ERROR, don't worry. You haven't broken it. Your VIC-20 is trying to help you correct your mistakes." 8-bit 6502 at 1 MHz. 5 KiB of RAM. And still more helpful than a frontier model when it comes to getting your shit right.
  - _pdp_ 6mo ago
    You are correct. One minor note. The skill issue isn't about failing to prompt it correctly, but rather failing to understand what it actually does. There's an entire crop of professionals who believe we can Harry Potter our way out of any situation with the right magic words.
neversupervised 6mo ago
The author’s intuition is still backward calibrated, even though he talks about the future. He doesn’t have an intuition for the future. All code will be AI generated. There’s no way to compete with the AI. And whatever new downsides this brings will be solved in ways we aren’t fully anticipating. But the solution is not to walk back vibecoding. You have to be blind to believe not most code will be vibecoded very soon.
- general_reveal 6mo ago
  Well, one thing I'll say is... If for whatever reason we have an electrical issue, or just general chip scarcity, then all programmers with experience will be the ones that can bail out society. Just saying. Especially because kids today won't really learn coding. Its a FAFA situation. Stay sharp!
- lionkor 6mo ago
  You have to be incredibly incompetent and naiive to look at the absolute garbage theatre that AI outputs today to go "yeah this will write all future code". Usually the response, for the last years, has been "no no you don't get it, it'll get so much better" and then they make the context window slightly larger and make it run python code to do math. What will really happen is that you and people like you will let Claude or some other commerical product write code, which it then owns. The second Claude becomes more expensive, you will pay, because all your tooling, your "prompts saved in commits" etc. will not work the same with whatever other AI offer. You've just reinvented vendor lock in, or "highly paid consultant code", on a whole new level.
  - neversupervised 6mo ago
    Can you explain what you think will happen, actually? People at OpenAi and Anthropic aren’t longer coding by hand. Are you saying everyone changes their mind and goes back? Not gonna happen. You have to work around this new constrain.
    - lionkor 6mo ago
lionkor 6mo ago
To all the vibe coders: When you let an LLM author code, it takes ownership of that code (in the engineering sense). When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do? You have to migration path. Your Codex prompts don't work the same in Claude. All the prompts you developed and saved in commits, all the (probably proprietary) memory the AI vendor saved in their servers to make the AI lock you in even more, all of it is worthless without the vendor. You are inventing "ah heck, we need to pay the consultant another 300 bucks an hour to take a look at this, because nobody else owns this code", but supercharged. You're locking yourself in, to a single vendor, to such a degree that they can just hold your code hostage. Now sure, OpenAI would NEVER do this, because they're all just doing good for humanity. Sure. What if they go out of business? Or discontinue the model that works for you, and the new ones just don't quite respond the same to your company's well established workflows?
- threethirtytwo 6mo ago
  I was locked into apple chips, amd chips and intel chips long ago. Everyone is already locked into one of these companies. The fact of reality is that the technology is so complex only for-profit centralized powers can really create these things. Linux and open source was a fluke and even then open source developers need closed source jobs to pay for their time doing open source. We are locked in and this is the future. Accept it or deny it one is delusional the other is reality. The world is transforming into vibe coding whether you like it or not. Accept reality. If you love programming, if you care for the craft. If programming is a form of artistry for you, if programming is your identity and status symbol. Then know that under current trends… all of that is going into the trash. Better rebuild a new identity quick. A lot of delusional excuse scaffolds people build around themselves to protect their identity is they just say “the hard part of software wasn’t really programming” which is kind of stupid because AI covers the hard part too.. in fact it covers it better then actual coding. Either way this excuse is more viable then “ai is useless slop”
- echelon 6mo ago
  > When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do? They'll hire the person who knows AI, not the human clinging onto claims of artisanal character by character code. It's entirely possible to engineer well-designed and intentional systems with AI tools and not stochastically "vibe" your way into tech debt. AI engineers will get hiring preference. That is until we're all replaced by full agentic engineering. And that's coming.
ljlolel 6mo ago
Code will be replaced by EnglishScript running on ClaudeVM https://jperla.com/blog/the-future-is-claudevm https://jperla.com/blog/the-future-is-claudevm
abcde666777 6mo ago
It seems to be inevitable that with any new technology we go through a phase of super duper excitement about the possibilities, where we try to use it to the extreme, and through that process start to absorb what it actually is and isn't capable of. The hype cycle's distasteful of course, but I've accepted that this is how humans figure out what things are. Like a child we have to abuse it before we learn how to properly use it. I think many of us sense and have sensed that the promises made of agentic programming smell too good to be true, owing to our own experiences as programmers and engineers. But experts in a domain are always the minority, so we have to understand that everyone else is going to have to reach the same intuition the hard way.
- r_lee 6mo ago
  that's the problem. I don't know if I'm just not seeing something that the vibe coders do, or if it's not really that crazy? like I'd say it's a productivity boost in some aspects, definitely. but it's not like you'd be able to get the same output unless you had years of experience and know what you're doing and going full unsupervised agentic mode I haven't seen much benefit from that. still have to pretty much just guide em to do this and that in this way
- echelon 6mo ago
  These models haven't been very good for long. To assume progress stops here is silly. I'm already growing tired of prognostications using the current status quo when the current status quo isn't even six months old.
- moconnor 6mo ago
  I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Well, 24 really because in the whole last year I barely wrote a line myself but my output increased dramatically. If you can’t see that it’s over, I’m not sure what to tell you. You will, in time.
  - shimman 6mo ago
    The type of work matters and understanding how capital interacts with labor is something that hasn't really changed over the last 150 years (not the first time productivity tools have been introduced in capitalism). All we are going to get is increased mass surveillance and molding software engineers into more assembly line work. Both things do not sound good or reasonable nor wanted by a majority in our industry. But sure! Being able to do more busy work is useful I guess, too bad the workers will never benefit from such a scheme; hopefully the masses don't overthrow the country, but I wouldn't blame them if they did.
ihodes 6mo ago
I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language. I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to a machine's execution context. Good abstraction meaningfully whittles away at this mismatch, and DSLs in powerful languages (like ML-family and lisp-family languages) have often mirrored natural(ish) language. Observe that programming languages themselves have natural language specifications that are meaningfully more dense than their implementations, and often govern multiple implementations. Code isn't just code. Some code encapsulates intent in a meaningfully information and meaning-dense way: that code is indeed poetry, and perhaps the best representation of intent available. Some code, like nearly every line of the code that backs your server vs client time example, is an implementation detail. The Electric Clojure version is a far better encapsulation of intent (https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.two-clocks$TwoClocks https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...). A natural language version, executed in the context of a program with an existing client server architecture, is likely best: "show a live updated version of the servers' unix epoch timestamp and the client's, and below that show the skew between them." Given that we started with Russell, we could end with Wittgenstein's "Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?"
- stevekrouse 6mo ago
  I think we're in agreement. My Dijkstra quote is the perfect rejoinder to your Wittgenstein: The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra
  - ihodes 6mo ago
    That's good—you guys should come out to visit sometime!
    - 6mo ago
aplomb1026 6mo ago
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vicchenai 6mo ago
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01100011 6mo ago
I don't expect AI to replace me anytime soon, but... AI is already letting me care less about the languages I use and focus more on the algorithms. AI helps me write tests. AI suggests improvements and catches bugs before compiling. AI writes helper scripts/tools for me. All of these things are good enough for me to accept paying a few hundred dollars every month, although I don't have to because my employer already does do that for me. 6 months ago I was arguing that AI wasn't very good and code was more precise than english for specifying solutions. The first part is not true anymore for many things I care about. The second is still true but for many things I care about it doesn't matter. I'm getting tired of articles that try to tell me what to think about AI. "AI is great and will replace all programmers!"... "AI sucks and will ruin your brain and codebase!"... both of these are tired and meaningless arguments.
evanmoran 6mo ago
I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”. This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventually convince Claude I was right, but to do it I basically had to write a structural proof to show clear ordering and forward progression in all cases. And even then compaction tends to reset it. There are a lot of subtleties these systems don’t quite have yet.
- isaachinman 6mo ago
  I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that
  - linolevan 6mo ago
    How much is OpenAI paying you for this
    - isaachinman 6mo ago
      Absolutely nothing. I have active subscriptions for both. Claude is better at FE stuff. Codex is better at actual programming.
      - steve_adams_86 6mo ago
        How is FE not actual programming? I spend less time on FE than I once did, but it has presented some of the most interesting programming challenges I've encountered in my career. It's a large technical space, rich with 'actual' programming to be done.
  - TheTaytay 6mo ago
    Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?
Waterluvian 6mo ago
I feel pretty strongly about a set of somewhat at-odds thoughts: - in a non-hobby setting, code is a liability - I want to solve problems, not write code - I love writing code as a hobby. - being paid to do my hobby professionally is amazing. - I love the idea of the Star Trek Ship’s Computer. To just ask for things and for it to do the work. It sometimes feels like we’re very close.
- i_love_retros 6mo ago
  Star trek is the polar opposite of what we are close to in every single way.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - sarchertech 6mo ago
    Nah. Remember the episode where Geordi asked the computer to create an opponent worthy of Data instead of Sherlock Holmes, and the computer creates sentient Moriarty with the ability to control the ship. That sounds exactly like something an LLM based system would do.
ggamezar 6mo ago
I remember when I moved to C++ from Python when I was a Junior. After getting deeper into C++, I started questioning whether Python programmers are really programmers or what we now call vibe coders. Just through a bit of experience, I realised that in a sense, Python just operates on different layers of abstractions and allows you to do more , and much faster, if in skilful hands. On the other hand, an uneducated person will just generate what we now call slop. For some reason, this parallel resonates with the current state of affairs
sathish316 6mo ago
Some of the good quotes or analogies in this article: 1 - “It seems like 99% of society has agreed that code is dead. …It's the same as thinking storytelling is dead at the invention of the printing press. No you dummies, code is just getting started. AI is going to be such a boon for coding.“ 2 - Another one comparing writing and coding, and explaining how Code is both a means and an end to manage complexity: “we're confused because we (incorrectly) think that code is only for the software it produces. It's only partly about that. The code itself is also a centrally important artifact… I think this is a lot clearer if you make an analogy to writing. Isn't it fucking telling that nobody is talking about "vibe writing"?”
jee599 6mo ago
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bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
should note that Mark Twain died 13 years after he announced reports of his death an exaggeration. We may expect code to be killed off in AI's troublesome teen years.
jama211 6mo ago
The biggest point everyone keeps missing is that a single code review makes your vibe coded code go from “terrifyingly dangerous” to “better than most people’s code” in one step. We’re at a point where LLMs write great code, way better than my average coworkers used to anyway. Of course, not reviewing said code by an expert would be a silly as not reviewing a coworkers code, there might be security vulnerabilities in there, hardcoded api keys, etc. But once it’s been professionally reviewed, it’s just as safe as any code written by a human only probably if a higher quality than most people write. On HN there’s an argument I keep seeing go back and forth which is like “vibe coding is the worst thing ever” and the other side will be like “AI is the second coming of christ and we don’t need programmers” - I think the reason we have what appears to be such opposing views is that those views are actually really close to one another, and proper review is all that separates one from the other. If you’re already an expert and you don’t vibe code most things and then carefully test and review after, you’re wasting the benefits of these machines. If you’re not an expert then you shouldn’t be employed in the first place, as the main thing people are employed for is responsibility, not output. This has always been the way in everything. A foreperson gets paid more than a worker on a building site not because they build more than the worker, but because they’re responsible for more than the worker. This is the real reason why programmer jobs won’t go away in my opinion.
twinpost_rules 6mo ago
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ssowonny 6mo ago
the moment your vibe-coded bot hits edge cases in message threading, you need someone who actually understands the abstraction layer.
maxbeech 6mo ago
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xorgun 6mo ago
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eichin 6mo ago
Got flashbacks to 1999 from some of those charts - I had a pair of design charts (partly for arguments, partly for onboarding) that were 17 nodes each and a lot of lines. (A coworker snuck in some extra nodes and an arrow labeled "troops move through Austria" and it was a while before anyone other than me noticed - yeah, that kind of chart.) This is not a lesson in design complexity - the design was pretty tight for what it did, even if you go back and read the patents - it's a lesson in the use of abstraction for explanation complexity and that you can break up the presentation more sanely than the code-on-disk actually is, you just have to stop and think about it (and have a bit more empathy for the people you're presenting to than, well, anyone in 1999 actually had :-)
yalvhe2009 6mo ago
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yalvhe2009 6mo ago
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peter_retief 6mo ago
The cartoon told me everything...
microbuilderco 6mo ago
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standarditem 6mo ago
I've enjoyed using Claude to essentially build my own APIs at whatever level of complexity I'm comfortable with at the time. I can use lower level APIs for graphics (for example), and Claude can abstract the boiler plate into my own personal API. Then when performance gets to be an issue, I can dig into the abstractions Claude handled for me and start to pick apart the slow-downs.
_the_inflator 6mo ago
The people who hold funeral addresses over "coders" or developers tend to miss the point. If devs are disposable now, then the only question is: who is next? I know of quite a lot of business people who kind of frolicking over the idea that the former behemoth got humbled so massively. From eating the world to unemployed in no time. This delusion itself is telling and perpetuates the clinging to the sinking ship that is still the Elephant in the Room. If something as complex or even complicated as app development including SDLCs etc. could simply be prompted now, then AI will eat anything less complicated alive. So people better start considering the implications and ramifications of their statements. Otherwise we are all doomed and part of a darwinian system that will weed out the unnecessary parts of the system or we acknowledge the fact that a traditional profession such as app development is fundamentally changing. This is something that happened before and constantly does. Otherwise we would not use DSL or Java. But the fundamentals still work and therefore you need abstractions.
- kolinko 6mo ago
  instead of asking „what’s next”, a good question to ask is „what jobs are now feasible that previously were cinstrained by the cost of producing software”?
tantalor 6mo ago
> Nobody is out there claiming that ChatGPT is putting the great novelists or journalists out of jobs. We all know that's nonsense. Of course they are taking about that!!
GavinAnderegg 6mo ago
> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates, but regardless of when, unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. We call that point AGI. I still don’t think this is certain. It’s telling that code generation is one of the few things these systems do extremely well. Translating between English and French isn’t that much different than translating between English and Python. These are both tasks where the most likely next token has a good shot of being correct. I’m still not sold that we should assume that LLM-based tech will be well-generalized beyond that. Maybe some new tech will come along to augment or replace LLMs and that will get us there, who knows. Just because the line is going up quickly at the moment doesn’t mean it always will.
gignico 6mo ago
I don’t know if someone said it already, but when Steve Jobs said this famous quote (“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”) he then died maybe just a couple of years later. Hope this does not happen to code :)
- tantalor 6mo ago
  Mark Twain.
smokedetector1 6mo ago
> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.
- trinsic2 6mo ago
  Yeah I was thinking this to, but he did say "Indistinguishable". I guess if you are a intellectual you can buy into that. Fortunately, consciousness and intelligence is much bigger than we can comprehend as human beings. We want to break everything down into understandable bites, but the truth is we are barley scratching the surface of what the brain does and what constitutes as intelligence.
- observationist 6mo ago
  Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered lakes, with humans clearly demonstrating superiority nearly everywhere. After transformers, the waterline began to rise, and today we no longer have a vast contiguous majority, but are left with a scattered handful of islands, and the waterline continues to rise. It's not arrogant or incurious to acknowledge the flood, but it might be to deny that flood is happening. If you think there are fundamental human qualities or capabilities that AI can't ever have, you might put in the work to articulate that, instead of projecting negativity onto people who have watched the vast majority of the human competencies landscape get completely submerged over the last 10 years. The islands we have remaining don't really suggest any unifying principle underlying things that AI is still bad at, but instead they highlight the lack of technical capabilities and various engineering tracks to solve for. Many of the problems are solved in principle, but are economically infeasible; for all intents and purposes, you might consider those islands completely submerged as well.
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irchans 6mo ago
This morning a person posted a question to the Reddit group r/Mathematica (https://www.reddit.com/r/Mathematica/comments/1s1fin2/can_homeomorphism_exists_between_one_point/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mathematica/comments/1s1fin2/can_ho...). I asked GPT to write code to address their question and the code was quite acceptable drawing the circle and finding the correct intersection point. It would have take me about 40 minutes to write the code, so I would not have done it myself. Currently, GPT is great for writing short programs. The results often have a bug or two that is easy to fix, but it's much faster to have GPT write the code. This works fine for projects that are less than 100 lines of code where you just want something that works.
- diarrhea 6mo ago
  This take was accurate about 2 years ago, up until perhaps one year ago. Current capabilities far exceed what you are outlining, for example using Claude Opus models in a harness such as Claude Code or OpenCode.
ryguz 6mo ago
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pier25 6mo ago
> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates Maybe but all technologies have limits. It's irrational to believe any single technology can be improved forever.
koromak 6mo ago
I desperately want this to be true, but at least in my sector, it isn't. You still need talented and knowledgable programmers, but they don't do very much programming. Its all code review, infrastructure, devops. At least for a small business, users are catching on that they can build a dirty app that gets them what they specifically want, instead of relying on some paid software to give everyone a little bit of what they want. Partially this suggests I'm just in the wrong sector, but it is absolutely happening. I dont' think this matters to Google or Amazon, they can't be replaced. But small businesses are a different story. And the result of all this? We need to heavily rely on AI, so that we can outpace individual users in delivering what they want. I hate it, I didn't give the order, but I do see the writing on the wall. This workflow is miserable, it sucks the fun out of the job, but unfortunately it really is faster. And small businesses rely on the income coming in next year, not in 5 years. As a side note, I also think users are becoming extremely used to having a chatbot do everything for them. Every site is going to have one, and apps that don't will fall behind. I'd like to be on a different multiverse timeline honestly
- ryanobjc 6mo ago
  The price hikes are going to be absolutely devastating. Imagine oracle level price acuity along with 0 competition and utter dependence. This is the future the AI labs are drooling for. You will be charged based on the value it delivers. People will be start making trade offs on if hiring humans would be cheaper than AI, etc. There's no way they're going to leave all that money on the table when there is all that investment to pay back.
z3t4 6mo ago
Programming is an abstraction of the machine code which describe what the computer should do. You could in theory program in prose, meaning the description of the program compiles into an app.
nadine1988 6mo ago
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machuz 6mo ago
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edwardsrobbie 6mo ago
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cat-turner 6mo ago
I think what people don't realize is that rent and the mortgage isn't paid through art. It's paid through boring, important work that is mostly uncreative and requires precision. A lot of people don't really care about doing anything innovative, they just want to do something to get money to sustain their life. The same goes for businesses. What a lot of people don't realize about software is that it is one of the few industries that offered a means to greatly improve your standard of living without requiring a formal degree. AI just one-shotted that kind of work. There will always be a place for humans to do creative things, but there won't be a place for average people to make a living. Example - look at animated movies. In the past studios hired hundreds of people to draw the movie. Now, its nearly all automated with software. The need for human artistic ability for commercial work is nearly gone, and only left for nice to have products. In 5 years we will see the same for software. It will be much faster than what happened to art because software is already in nearly every aspect of life.
jmull 6mo ago
> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. I'm sure it will be possible, but it may well be very expensive. If it is, why would anyone spend the resources? AI evolution will certainly follow the money, which is not necessarily the same as the path to AGI.
OutOfHere 6mo ago
It's a horrific article that starts off wrong by equating specification with code. In reality, the relevance of a specification comes with substantial abstraction that its author doesn't care about. The goodness of a spec is not just from what is defined, but also from what is left out. Code on the other hand leaves nothing out, unless you get into compiler level optimizations. The two are not the same.
clawbridge 6mo ago
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611 points by stevekrouse 6mo ago

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rvz 6mo ago

From "code" to "no-code" to "vibe coding" and back to "code". What you are seeing here is that many are attempting to take shortcuts to building production-grade maintainable software with AI and now realizing that they have built their software on terrible architecture only to throw it away, rewriting it with now no-one truly understanding the code or can explain it. We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". [0] With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. This is exactly happening to engineers at AWS with Kiro causing outages [1] and now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI). [0] https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cloud-outages-ai-tools-amazon-web-services-aws https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cl... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f77...

suzzer99 6mo ago
> With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. I've had to work on multiple legacy systems like this where the original devs are long gone, there's no documentation, and everyone at the company admits it's complete mess. They send you off with a sympathetic, "Good luck, just do the best you can!" I call it "throwing dye in the water." It's the opposite of fun programming. On the other hand, it often takes creativity and general cleverness to get the app to do what you want with minimally-invasive code changes. So it should be the hardest for AI.
Insanity 6mo ago
While I agree with everything you said, Amazon’s problems aren’t just Kiro messing up. It’s a brain drain due to layoffs, and then people quitting because of the continuous layoff culture. While publicly they might say this is AI driven, I think that’s mostly BS. Anyway, that doesn’t take away from your point, just adds additional context to the outages.
zer00eyz 6mo ago
> We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". > now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI). What does this say about the "code review" process if people cant understand the things they didn't write? Maybe we have had the wrong hiring criteria. The "leet code", brain teaser (FAANG style) write some code interview might not have been the best filter for the sorts of people you need working in your org today. Reading code, tooling up (debuggers, profilers), durable testing (Simulation, not unit) are the skill changes that NO ONE is talking about, and we have not been honing or hiring for. No one is talking about requirements, problem scoping, how you rationalize and think about building things. No one is talking about how your choice of dev environment is going to impact all of the above processes. I see a lot of hype, and a lot of hate, but not a lot of the pragmatic middle.
- xienze 6mo ago
  > This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". Yeah but that takes years to play out. Now developers are cranking out thousands of lines of “he doesn’t work here anymore” code every day.
  - zer00eyz 6mo ago
    > Yeah but that takes years to play out. https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover has some data, that aligns with my own experience putting the average at 2 years. I have been doing this a long time: my longest running piece of code was 20 years. My current is 10. Most of my code is long dead and replaced because businesses evolve, close, move on. A lot of my code was NEVER ment to be permanent. It solved a problem in a moment, it accomplished a task, fit for purpose and disposable (and riddled with cursing, manual loops and goofy exceptions just to get the job done). Meanwhile I have seen a LOT of god awful code written by humans. Business running on things that are SO BAD that I still have shell shock that they ever worked. AI is just a tool. It's going from hammers to nail guns. The people involved are still the ones who are ultimately accountable.
andrekandre 6mo ago
> With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done. i have seen this in real-time as we roll out this stuff; its not pretty and its aggravating as a code reviewer when asking "why is this here?" or "what does this part do?" and i cant get a straight answer except "i don't remember exactly"...

deadbabe 6mo ago

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

oooyay 6mo ago
> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage of the industry walked away from shift-left greatly more capable than the rest, a larger chunk left the industry entirely, and some people never changed. The same thing will likely happen here. We'll learn a lot of lessons, the Overton window will shift, the world will be different, and it will move on. We'll have new problems and topics to deal with as AI and how to use it shifts away from being a primary topic.
- oblio 6mo ago
  Shift left? Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...
  - esafak 6mo ago
    It's a security practice. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-security/shift-left-security/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-se...
    - oblio 6mo ago
      I've heard a ton of times about "designing/planning for quality and security from the start", I guess it can't hurt to also have a buzzword for it.

aplomb1026 6mo ago

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soumyaskartha 6mo ago

Every few years something is going to kill code and here we are. The job changes, it does not disappear.

suzzer99 6mo ago
For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.
- drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  This is already happening, many days I am that grumpy "code janitor" yelling at the damn kids to improve their slop after shit blows up in prod. I can tell you It's not "fun", but hopefully we'll converge on a scalable review system eventually that doesn't rely on a few "olds" to clean up. GenAI systems produce a lot of "mostly ok" code that has subtle issues you on catch with some experience. Maybe I should just retire a few years early and go back to fixing cars...
  - suzzer99 6mo ago
    Yeah I imagine it has to be utterly thankless being the code janitor right now when all the hype around AI is peaking. You're basically just the grumpy troll slowing things down. And God forbid you introduce a regression bug trying to clean up some AI slop code. Maybe in the future us olds will get more credit when apps fall over and the higher ups realize they actually need a high-powered cleaner/fixer, like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction.
    - allthetime 6mo ago
      I’ve got a “I haven’t written a line of code in one year” buddy whose startup is gaining traction and contracts. He’s rewritten the whole stack twice already after hitting performance issues and is now hiring cheap juniors to clean up the things he generates. It is all relatively well defined CRUD that he’s just slapped a bunch of JS libs on top of that works well enough to sell, but I’m curious to see the long term effects of these decisions. Meanwhile I’m moving at about half the speed with a more hands on approach (still using the bots obviously) but my code quality and output are miles ahead of where I was last year without sacrificing maintain ability and performance for dev speed

erichocean 6mo ago

> If you know of any other snippet of code that can master all that complexity as beautifully, I'd love to see it. Electric Clojure: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.two-clocks$TwoClocks https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...

stevekrouse 6mo ago
Sick!!! Great example! I'm actually a longtime friend and angel investor in Dustin but I hadn't seen this

idopmstuff 6mo ago

I don't know that people are saying code is dead (or at least the ones who have even a vague understanding of AI's role) - more that humans are moving up a level of abstraction in their inputs. Rather than writing code, they can write specs in English and have AI write the code, much in the same way that humans moved from writing assembly to writing higher-level code. But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. There are probably a lot of cases where you could write an instruction unambiguously in English, but it'd end up being much longer because English is much less precise than any coding language. I think we'll see the same in photo and video editing as AI gets better at that. If I need to make a change to a photo, I'll be able to ask a computer, and it'll be able to do it. But if I need the change to be pixel-perfect, it'll be much more efficient to just do it in Photoshop than to describe the change in English. But much like with photo editing, there'll be a lot of cases where you just don't need a high enough level of specificity to use a coding language. I build tools for myself using AI, and as long as they do what I expect them to do, they're fine. Code's probably not the best, but that just doesn't matter for my case. (There are of course also issues of code quality, tech debt, etc., but I think that as AI gets better and better over the next few years, it'll be able to write reliable, secure, production-grade code better than humans anyway.)

cactusplant7374 6mo ago
> But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. Unless the defect rate for humans is greater than LLMs at some point. A lot of claims are being made about hallucinations that seem to ignore that all software is extremely buggy. I can't use my phone without encountering a few bugs every day.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though, not by just making something up to leap to the conclusion considered most probable, so not sure if the comparison makes sense.

lucasay 6mo ago

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pacman128 6mo ago

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

kstrauser 6mo ago
That’s factually untrue. I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on, doing things no one’s ever done with them, and I know this because I ecosystem around these young frameworks. Models can RTFM (and code) and do novel things, demonstrably so.
- allthetime 6mo ago
  Yeah. I work with bleeding edge zig. If you just ask Claude to write you a working tcp server with the new Io api, it doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing and the code doesn’t compile. But if you give it some minimal code examples, point it to the recent blog posts about it, and paste in relevant points from std it does incredibly well and produce code that it has not been trained on.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
    It’s always been about context, then being able to communicate it. Manager people or managing a hyper-knowledgeable intern (LLM). If you know what you need, actually want what you want (super difficult), and have the ability to provide context to someone else… management has always been easier for you than others. I find one of the more interesting things about the current “AI debate” is that many programmers are autistic or at least close one side of an empathetic spectrum that they’ve always had trouble communicating what is needed for a task and why. So it’s hard for me to take the opinions going around.
  - qweiopqweiop 6mo ago
    It also needs a validation loop. Give it the compiler output and I bet it would fix that code even without examples/a blog post.

gedy 6mo ago

When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs... I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?". I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less code to understand. I'm feeling the same vibe these days with the "isn't it great?". Not really!

justonceokay 6mo ago
You just brought me back to my first internship where as interns we were asked to hand-manipulate a 30k lines auto-generated SOAP API definition because we lost the license to the software that generated it
drzaiusx11 6mo ago
Oh the memories, but at least that generated code was deterministic...
bitwize 6mo ago
I remember the first time trying to work with MFC. I was aghast at all the generated garbage the IDE produced. But I guess if you're a drone working in an insurance company somewhere, you don't want to have to deal with message loops, window classes, WinMain, and all that, so you would welcome all that stuff just being handled for you while you just filled in the application-specific code. To me, that was the fun part of programming against the Windows API. And it was gonna come bite you anyway, so in for a penny... Extrapolate to the present day with LLM-generated code. I'm sure you're not far off the actual mark.

Plutarco_ink 6mo ago

[dead]

rglover 6mo ago

It's only dead to those who are ignorant to what it takes to build and run real systems that don't tip over all the time (or leak data, embroil you in extortion, etc). That will piss some people off but it's worth considering if you don't want to perma-railroad yourself long-term. Many seem to be so blinded by the glitz, glamour, and dollar signs that they don't realize they're actively destroying their future prospects/reputation by getting all emo about a non-deterministic printer. Valuable? Yep. World changing? Absolutely. The domain of people who haven't the slightest clue what they're doing? Not unless you enjoy lighting money on fire.

derrak 6mo ago
> non-deterministic printer. I interpret non-deterministic here as “an LLM will not produce the same output on the same input.” This is a) not true and b) not actually a problem. a) LLMs are functions and appearances otherwise are due to how we use them b) lots of traditional technologies which have none of the problems of LLMs are non-deterministic. E.g., symbolic non-deterministic algorithms. Non-determinism isn’t the problem with LLMs. The problem is that there is no formal relationship between the input and output.

cratermoon 6mo ago

Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt."

woeirua 6mo ago
Djikstra wasn’t a god. He’s going to be wrong on this one.
- bigstrat2003 6mo ago
  He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
  - esafak 6mo ago
    How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.
    - Capricorn2481 6mo ago
      Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.
      - esafak 6mo ago
        Go on. How, in this context?

deleted 6mo ago

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picafrost 6mo ago

So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible. Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.

oblio 6mo ago
Those are business goals that don't just go away because tech changes.
- picafrost 6mo ago
  Of course. But LLMs may subtract the need for top talent to be working on them.
- fritzo 6mo ago
  Those business goals will soon realize they need more electricity. More brains will be devoted to power generation.
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  Likely, but through regulation, not AI

flitzofolov 6mo ago

r0ml's third law states that: “Any distributed system based on exchanging data will be replaced by a system based on exchanging programs.” I believe the same pattern is inevitable for these higher level abstractions and interfaces to generate computer instructions. The language use must ultimately conform to a rigid syntax, and produce a deterministic result, a.k.a. "code". Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5fmhYc4U-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5fmhYc4U-Y

internet_points 6mo ago
> “Any distributed system based on exchanging data will be replaced by a system based on exchanging programs.” So distributed systems tend to converge towards being more and more mystifying? Cf. the mythical mammoth: > Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

lateforwork 6mo ago

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI systems are trained on vast bodies of human work and generate answers near the center of existing thought. A human might occasionally step back and question conventional wisdom, but AI systems do not do this on their own. They align with consensus rather than challenge it. As a result, they cannot independently push knowledge forward. Humans can innovate with help from AI, but AI still requires human direction. You can prod AI systems to think critically, but they tend to revert to the mean. When a conversation moves away from consensus thinking, you can feel the system pulling back toward the safe middle. As Apple’s “Think Different” campaign in the late 90s put it: the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do—the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently. AI is none of that. AI is a conformist. That is its strength, and that is its weakness. [1] https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-reveals-about-the-future-of-software https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...

thesz 6mo ago
> ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of accuracy. These theorems provide a mathematical justification for using neural networks, assuring researchers that a sufficiently large or deep network can model the complex, non-linear relationships often found in real-world data." And then: "Notice also that the neural network is only required to approximate within a compact set K {\displaystyle K}. The proof does not describe how the function would be extrapolated outside of the region." NNs, LLMs included, are interpolators, not extrapolators. And the region NN approximates within can be quite complex and not easily defined as "X:R^N drawn from N(c,s)^N" as SolidGoldMagiKarp [2] clearly shows. [2] https://github.com/NiluK/SolidGoldMagikarp https://github.com/NiluK/SolidGoldMagikarp

cratermoon 6mo ago

I can't tell if the author's "when we get AGI" is sarcasm or genuine.

stevekrouse 6mo ago
Genuine!

woeirua 6mo ago

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than a year. Anyone who thinks AGI is far away deserves to be blindsided.

anematode 6mo ago
In agree in principle, but the compiler is a terrible example given the amount of scaffolding afforded to the LLMs, literally hundreds of thousands of test cases covering all kinds of esoteric corners. Also (and this is coming from someone who thinks it's quite close) "AGI" is not implied by the ability to implement very-long-horizon software tasks. That's not "general" at all.
- woeirua 6mo ago
  You're moving the goal posts. A year ago, _no one_ thought it could write a working compiler. Yes, the compilers we've seen today are not great. Yes, they rely too much on existing implementations. But... if you can't see which way the wind is blowing then I can't help you at this point. AGI is a meaningless milestone. No one can actually define it. The best definition I've seen is the one that ARC is using: "AI that is as good at a human at every task".
  - anematode 6mo ago
    What goal posts have I moved? You seem to be attributing arguments to me that I haven't made. I'm simply pointing out that the example you gave involves a level of scaffolding that most projects don't have, so that the data point is exaggerated; and that it's possible (and quite reasonable) to have an agent that is extremely good at programming while not matching what most companies and people in the space have defined as "AGI". I do believe that we'll soon have agents that can achieve Claude C Compiler–level achievements in spaces with far less scaffolding.

jee599 6mo ago

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bluGill 6mo ago

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wouldn't have any innovations as the space is already well covered. Where I'm different from other compilers is more likely a case of I did something stupid that someone who knows how to write a compiler wouldn't.

lateforwork 6mo ago
> as the space is already well covered The US patent commissioner in 1899 wanted to shutdown the patent office because "everything that can be invented has been invented." And yet, human ingenuity keeps proving otherwise.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  There are lots of small innovations left. Only a few patents have ever been for revolutions. Small innovaions add up to big things.
- appletrotter 6mo ago
  This is apocraphyl :(
3836293648 6mo ago
You could probably do it in a few days, C is not that hard to compile
- lateforwork 6mo ago
  Right, and that was a design goal of C language... to be close to the machine.
  - 3836293648 6mo ago

pjmlp 6mo ago

This is coping, with tools like Boomi, n8n, Langflow, and similar, there are plenty of automated tasks that can already be configured and that's it.

randcraw 6mo ago

Krouse points to a great article by Simon Willison who proposes that the killer role for vibe coding (hopefully) will be to make code better and not just faster. By generating prototypes that are based on different design models each end product can be assessed for specific criteria like code readability, reliability, or fault tolerance and then quickly be revised repeatedly to serve these ends better. No longer would the victory dance of vibe coding be simply "It ran!" or "Look how quickly I built it!".

roxolotl 6mo ago
This is my hope as well. We now have time to write things a bit better. Comment on the pr with a quick improvement and it can just happen. But I’m failing to convince people at work. The majority seem to just be happy for code to go away and for us to never think about it again.

_pdp_ 6mo ago

Remember Deep Thought, the greatest computer ever built that spent 7.5 million years computing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? The answer was 42, perfectly correct, utterly useless because nobody understood the question they were asking. That's what happens when you hand everything to a machine without understanding the problem yourself. AI can give you correct answers all day long, but if you don't understand what you're building, you'll end up just like the people of Magrathea, staring at 42 and wondering what to do with it. True understanding is indistinguishable from doing.

bitwize 6mo ago
Well, yes, but AI can also give you wildly incorrect answers with alarming frequency. I know, I know, "skill issue"/"you're holding it wrong". And maybe that's vacuously true, in that it's so hard to guess what will produce correct output, because LLMs are not an abstraction layer in the way that we're used to. Prior abstraction layers related input to output via a transparent homomorphism: the output produced for an input was knowable and relatively straightforward (even with exotic optimization flags). LLMs are not like that. Your input disappears into a maze of twisty little matmuls, all alike (a different maze per run, for the same input!) and you can't relate what comes out the other end in terms of the input except in terms of "vibes". So to get a particular output, you just have to guess how to prompt it, and it is not very helpful if you guess wrong except in providing a wrong (often very subtly so) response! Back in the day, I had a very primitive, rinky-dink computer—a VIC-20. The VIC-20 came with one of the best "intro to programming" guides a kid could ask for. Regarding error messages it said something like this: "If your VIC-20 tells you something like ?SYNTAX ERROR, don't worry. You haven't broken it. Your VIC-20 is trying to help you correct your mistakes." 8-bit 6502 at 1 MHz. 5 KiB of RAM. And still more helpful than a frontier model when it comes to getting your shit right.
- _pdp_ 6mo ago
  You are correct. One minor note. The skill issue isn't about failing to prompt it correctly, but rather failing to understand what it actually does. There's an entire crop of professionals who believe we can Harry Potter our way out of any situation with the right magic words.

neversupervised 6mo ago

The author’s intuition is still backward calibrated, even though he talks about the future. He doesn’t have an intuition for the future. All code will be AI generated. There’s no way to compete with the AI. And whatever new downsides this brings will be solved in ways we aren’t fully anticipating. But the solution is not to walk back vibecoding. You have to be blind to believe not most code will be vibecoded very soon.

general_reveal 6mo ago
Well, one thing I'll say is... If for whatever reason we have an electrical issue, or just general chip scarcity, then all programmers with experience will be the ones that can bail out society. Just saying. Especially because kids today won't really learn coding. Its a FAFA situation. Stay sharp!
lionkor 6mo ago
You have to be incredibly incompetent and naiive to look at the absolute garbage theatre that AI outputs today to go "yeah this will write all future code". Usually the response, for the last years, has been "no no you don't get it, it'll get so much better" and then they make the context window slightly larger and make it run python code to do math. What will really happen is that you and people like you will let Claude or some other commerical product write code, which it then owns. The second Claude becomes more expensive, you will pay, because all your tooling, your "prompts saved in commits" etc. will not work the same with whatever other AI offer. You've just reinvented vendor lock in, or "highly paid consultant code", on a whole new level.
- neversupervised 6mo ago
  Can you explain what you think will happen, actually? People at OpenAi and Anthropic aren’t longer coding by hand. Are you saying everyone changes their mind and goes back? Not gonna happen. You have to work around this new constrain.
  - lionkor 6mo ago

lionkor 6mo ago

To all the vibe coders: When you let an LLM author code, it takes ownership of that code (in the engineering sense). When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do? You have to migration path. Your Codex prompts don't work the same in Claude. All the prompts you developed and saved in commits, all the (probably proprietary) memory the AI vendor saved in their servers to make the AI lock you in even more, all of it is worthless without the vendor. You are inventing "ah heck, we need to pay the consultant another 300 bucks an hour to take a look at this, because nobody else owns this code", but supercharged. You're locking yourself in, to a single vendor, to such a degree that they can just hold your code hostage. Now sure, OpenAI would NEVER do this, because they're all just doing good for humanity. Sure. What if they go out of business? Or discontinue the model that works for you, and the new ones just don't quite respond the same to your company's well established workflows?

threethirtytwo 6mo ago
I was locked into apple chips, amd chips and intel chips long ago. Everyone is already locked into one of these companies. The fact of reality is that the technology is so complex only for-profit centralized powers can really create these things. Linux and open source was a fluke and even then open source developers need closed source jobs to pay for their time doing open source. We are locked in and this is the future. Accept it or deny it one is delusional the other is reality. The world is transforming into vibe coding whether you like it or not. Accept reality. If you love programming, if you care for the craft. If programming is a form of artistry for you, if programming is your identity and status symbol. Then know that under current trends… all of that is going into the trash. Better rebuild a new identity quick. A lot of delusional excuse scaffolds people build around themselves to protect their identity is they just say “the hard part of software wasn’t really programming” which is kind of stupid because AI covers the hard part too.. in fact it covers it better then actual coding. Either way this excuse is more viable then “ai is useless slop”
echelon 6mo ago
> When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do? They'll hire the person who knows AI, not the human clinging onto claims of artisanal character by character code. It's entirely possible to engineer well-designed and intentional systems with AI tools and not stochastically "vibe" your way into tech debt. AI engineers will get hiring preference. That is until we're all replaced by full agentic engineering. And that's coming.

ljlolel 6mo ago

Code will be replaced by EnglishScript running on ClaudeVM https://jperla.com/blog/the-future-is-claudevm https://jperla.com/blog/the-future-is-claudevm

abcde666777 6mo ago

It seems to be inevitable that with any new technology we go through a phase of super duper excitement about the possibilities, where we try to use it to the extreme, and through that process start to absorb what it actually is and isn't capable of. The hype cycle's distasteful of course, but I've accepted that this is how humans figure out what things are. Like a child we have to abuse it before we learn how to properly use it. I think many of us sense and have sensed that the promises made of agentic programming smell too good to be true, owing to our own experiences as programmers and engineers. But experts in a domain are always the minority, so we have to understand that everyone else is going to have to reach the same intuition the hard way.

r_lee 6mo ago
that's the problem. I don't know if I'm just not seeing something that the vibe coders do, or if it's not really that crazy? like I'd say it's a productivity boost in some aspects, definitely. but it's not like you'd be able to get the same output unless you had years of experience and know what you're doing and going full unsupervised agentic mode I haven't seen much benefit from that. still have to pretty much just guide em to do this and that in this way
echelon 6mo ago
These models haven't been very good for long. To assume progress stops here is silly. I'm already growing tired of prognostications using the current status quo when the current status quo isn't even six months old.
moconnor 6mo ago
I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Well, 24 really because in the whole last year I barely wrote a line myself but my output increased dramatically. If you can’t see that it’s over, I’m not sure what to tell you. You will, in time.
- shimman 6mo ago
  The type of work matters and understanding how capital interacts with labor is something that hasn't really changed over the last 150 years (not the first time productivity tools have been introduced in capitalism). All we are going to get is increased mass surveillance and molding software engineers into more assembly line work. Both things do not sound good or reasonable nor wanted by a majority in our industry. But sure! Being able to do more busy work is useful I guess, too bad the workers will never benefit from such a scheme; hopefully the masses don't overthrow the country, but I wouldn't blame them if they did.

ihodes 6mo ago

I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language. I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to a machine's execution context. Good abstraction meaningfully whittles away at this mismatch, and DSLs in powerful languages (like ML-family and lisp-family languages) have often mirrored natural(ish) language. Observe that programming languages themselves have natural language specifications that are meaningfully more dense than their implementations, and often govern multiple implementations. Code isn't just code. Some code encapsulates intent in a meaningfully information and meaning-dense way: that code is indeed poetry, and perhaps the best representation of intent available. Some code, like nearly every line of the code that backs your server vs client time example, is an implementation detail. The Electric Clojure version is a far better encapsulation of intent (https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.two-clocks$TwoClocks https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...). A natural language version, executed in the context of a program with an existing client server architecture, is likely best: "show a live updated version of the servers' unix epoch timestamp and the client's, and below that show the skew between them." Given that we started with Russell, we could end with Wittgenstein's "Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?"

stevekrouse 6mo ago
I think we're in agreement. My Dijkstra quote is the perfect rejoinder to your Wittgenstein: The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra
- ihodes 6mo ago
  That's good—you guys should come out to visit sometime!
  - 6mo ago

aplomb1026 6mo ago

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vicchenai 6mo ago

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01100011 6mo ago

I don't expect AI to replace me anytime soon, but... AI is already letting me care less about the languages I use and focus more on the algorithms. AI helps me write tests. AI suggests improvements and catches bugs before compiling. AI writes helper scripts/tools for me. All of these things are good enough for me to accept paying a few hundred dollars every month, although I don't have to because my employer already does do that for me. 6 months ago I was arguing that AI wasn't very good and code was more precise than english for specifying solutions. The first part is not true anymore for many things I care about. The second is still true but for many things I care about it doesn't matter. I'm getting tired of articles that try to tell me what to think about AI. "AI is great and will replace all programmers!"... "AI sucks and will ruin your brain and codebase!"... both of these are tired and meaningless arguments.

evanmoran 6mo ago

I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”. This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventually convince Claude I was right, but to do it I basically had to write a structural proof to show clear ordering and forward progression in all cases. And even then compaction tends to reset it. There are a lot of subtleties these systems don’t quite have yet.

isaachinman 6mo ago
I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that
- linolevan 6mo ago
  How much is OpenAI paying you for this
  - isaachinman 6mo ago
    Absolutely nothing. I have active subscriptions for both. Claude is better at FE stuff. Codex is better at actual programming.
    - steve_adams_86 6mo ago
      How is FE not actual programming? I spend less time on FE than I once did, but it has presented some of the most interesting programming challenges I've encountered in my career. It's a large technical space, rich with 'actual' programming to be done.
- TheTaytay 6mo ago
  Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?

Waterluvian 6mo ago

I feel pretty strongly about a set of somewhat at-odds thoughts: - in a non-hobby setting, code is a liability - I want to solve problems, not write code - I love writing code as a hobby. - being paid to do my hobby professionally is amazing. - I love the idea of the Star Trek Ship’s Computer. To just ask for things and for it to do the work. It sometimes feels like we’re very close.

i_love_retros 6mo ago
Star trek is the polar opposite of what we are close to in every single way.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- sarchertech 6mo ago
  Nah. Remember the episode where Geordi asked the computer to create an opponent worthy of Data instead of Sherlock Holmes, and the computer creates sentient Moriarty with the ability to control the ship. That sounds exactly like something an LLM based system would do.

ggamezar 6mo ago

I remember when I moved to C++ from Python when I was a Junior. After getting deeper into C++, I started questioning whether Python programmers are really programmers or what we now call vibe coders. Just through a bit of experience, I realised that in a sense, Python just operates on different layers of abstractions and allows you to do more , and much faster, if in skilful hands. On the other hand, an uneducated person will just generate what we now call slop. For some reason, this parallel resonates with the current state of affairs

sathish316 6mo ago

Some of the good quotes or analogies in this article: 1 - “It seems like 99% of society has agreed that code is dead. …It's the same as thinking storytelling is dead at the invention of the printing press. No you dummies, code is just getting started. AI is going to be such a boon for coding.“ 2 - Another one comparing writing and coding, and explaining how Code is both a means and an end to manage complexity: “we're confused because we (incorrectly) think that code is only for the software it produces. It's only partly about that. The code itself is also a centrally important artifact… I think this is a lot clearer if you make an analogy to writing. Isn't it fucking telling that nobody is talking about "vibe writing"?”

jee599 6mo ago

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bryanrasmussen 6mo ago

should note that Mark Twain died 13 years after he announced reports of his death an exaggeration. We may expect code to be killed off in AI's troublesome teen years.

jama211 6mo ago

The biggest point everyone keeps missing is that a single code review makes your vibe coded code go from “terrifyingly dangerous” to “better than most people’s code” in one step. We’re at a point where LLMs write great code, way better than my average coworkers used to anyway. Of course, not reviewing said code by an expert would be a silly as not reviewing a coworkers code, there might be security vulnerabilities in there, hardcoded api keys, etc. But once it’s been professionally reviewed, it’s just as safe as any code written by a human only probably if a higher quality than most people write. On HN there’s an argument I keep seeing go back and forth which is like “vibe coding is the worst thing ever” and the other side will be like “AI is the second coming of christ and we don’t need programmers” - I think the reason we have what appears to be such opposing views is that those views are actually really close to one another, and proper review is all that separates one from the other. If you’re already an expert and you don’t vibe code most things and then carefully test and review after, you’re wasting the benefits of these machines. If you’re not an expert then you shouldn’t be employed in the first place, as the main thing people are employed for is responsibility, not output. This has always been the way in everything. A foreperson gets paid more than a worker on a building site not because they build more than the worker, but because they’re responsible for more than the worker. This is the real reason why programmer jobs won’t go away in my opinion.

twinpost_rules 6mo ago

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ssowonny 6mo ago

the moment your vibe-coded bot hits edge cases in message threading, you need someone who actually understands the abstraction layer.

maxbeech 6mo ago

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xorgun 6mo ago

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eichin 6mo ago

Got flashbacks to 1999 from some of those charts - I had a pair of design charts (partly for arguments, partly for onboarding) that were 17 nodes each and a lot of lines. (A coworker snuck in some extra nodes and an arrow labeled "troops move through Austria" and it was a while before anyone other than me noticed - yeah, that kind of chart.) This is not a lesson in design complexity - the design was pretty tight for what it did, even if you go back and read the patents - it's a lesson in the use of abstraction for explanation complexity and that you can break up the presentation more sanely than the code-on-disk actually is, you just have to stop and think about it (and have a bit more empathy for the people you're presenting to than, well, anyone in 1999 actually had :-)

yalvhe2009 6mo ago

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yalvhe2009 6mo ago

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peter_retief 6mo ago

The cartoon told me everything...

microbuilderco 6mo ago

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standarditem 6mo ago

I've enjoyed using Claude to essentially build my own APIs at whatever level of complexity I'm comfortable with at the time. I can use lower level APIs for graphics (for example), and Claude can abstract the boiler plate into my own personal API. Then when performance gets to be an issue, I can dig into the abstractions Claude handled for me and start to pick apart the slow-downs.

_the_inflator 6mo ago

The people who hold funeral addresses over "coders" or developers tend to miss the point. If devs are disposable now, then the only question is: who is next? I know of quite a lot of business people who kind of frolicking over the idea that the former behemoth got humbled so massively. From eating the world to unemployed in no time. This delusion itself is telling and perpetuates the clinging to the sinking ship that is still the Elephant in the Room. If something as complex or even complicated as app development including SDLCs etc. could simply be prompted now, then AI will eat anything less complicated alive. So people better start considering the implications and ramifications of their statements. Otherwise we are all doomed and part of a darwinian system that will weed out the unnecessary parts of the system or we acknowledge the fact that a traditional profession such as app development is fundamentally changing. This is something that happened before and constantly does. Otherwise we would not use DSL or Java. But the fundamentals still work and therefore you need abstractions.

kolinko 6mo ago
instead of asking „what’s next”, a good question to ask is „what jobs are now feasible that previously were cinstrained by the cost of producing software”?

tantalor 6mo ago

> Nobody is out there claiming that ChatGPT is putting the great novelists or journalists out of jobs. We all know that's nonsense. Of course they are taking about that!!

GavinAnderegg 6mo ago

> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates, but regardless of when, unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. We call that point AGI. I still don’t think this is certain. It’s telling that code generation is one of the few things these systems do extremely well. Translating between English and French isn’t that much different than translating between English and Python. These are both tasks where the most likely next token has a good shot of being correct. I’m still not sold that we should assume that LLM-based tech will be well-generalized beyond that. Maybe some new tech will come along to augment or replace LLMs and that will get us there, who knows. Just because the line is going up quickly at the moment doesn’t mean it always will.

gignico 6mo ago

I don’t know if someone said it already, but when Steve Jobs said this famous quote (“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”) he then died maybe just a couple of years later. Hope this does not happen to code :)

tantalor 6mo ago
Mark Twain.

smokedetector1 6mo ago

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

trinsic2 6mo ago
Yeah I was thinking this to, but he did say "Indistinguishable". I guess if you are a intellectual you can buy into that. Fortunately, consciousness and intelligence is much bigger than we can comprehend as human beings. We want to break everything down into understandable bites, but the truth is we are barley scratching the surface of what the brain does and what constitutes as intelligence.
observationist 6mo ago
Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered lakes, with humans clearly demonstrating superiority nearly everywhere. After transformers, the waterline began to rise, and today we no longer have a vast contiguous majority, but are left with a scattered handful of islands, and the waterline continues to rise. It's not arrogant or incurious to acknowledge the flood, but it might be to deny that flood is happening. If you think there are fundamental human qualities or capabilities that AI can't ever have, you might put in the work to articulate that, instead of projecting negativity onto people who have watched the vast majority of the human competencies landscape get completely submerged over the last 10 years. The islands we have remaining don't really suggest any unifying principle underlying things that AI is still bad at, but instead they highlight the lack of technical capabilities and various engineering tracks to solve for. Many of the problems are solved in principle, but are economically infeasible; for all intents and purposes, you might consider those islands completely submerged as well.
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irchans 6mo ago

This morning a person posted a question to the Reddit group r/Mathematica (https://www.reddit.com/r/Mathematica/comments/1s1fin2/can_homeomorphism_exists_between_one_point/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mathematica/comments/1s1fin2/can_ho...). I asked GPT to write code to address their question and the code was quite acceptable drawing the circle and finding the correct intersection point. It would have take me about 40 minutes to write the code, so I would not have done it myself. Currently, GPT is great for writing short programs. The results often have a bug or two that is easy to fix, but it's much faster to have GPT write the code. This works fine for projects that are less than 100 lines of code where you just want something that works.

diarrhea 6mo ago
This take was accurate about 2 years ago, up until perhaps one year ago. Current capabilities far exceed what you are outlining, for example using Claude Opus models in a harness such as Claude Code or OpenCode.

ryguz 6mo ago

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pier25 6mo ago

> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates Maybe but all technologies have limits. It's irrational to believe any single technology can be improved forever.

koromak 6mo ago

I desperately want this to be true, but at least in my sector, it isn't. You still need talented and knowledgable programmers, but they don't do very much programming. Its all code review, infrastructure, devops. At least for a small business, users are catching on that they can build a dirty app that gets them what they specifically want, instead of relying on some paid software to give everyone a little bit of what they want. Partially this suggests I'm just in the wrong sector, but it is absolutely happening. I dont' think this matters to Google or Amazon, they can't be replaced. But small businesses are a different story. And the result of all this? We need to heavily rely on AI, so that we can outpace individual users in delivering what they want. I hate it, I didn't give the order, but I do see the writing on the wall. This workflow is miserable, it sucks the fun out of the job, but unfortunately it really is faster. And small businesses rely on the income coming in next year, not in 5 years. As a side note, I also think users are becoming extremely used to having a chatbot do everything for them. Every site is going to have one, and apps that don't will fall behind. I'd like to be on a different multiverse timeline honestly

ryanobjc 6mo ago
The price hikes are going to be absolutely devastating. Imagine oracle level price acuity along with 0 competition and utter dependence. This is the future the AI labs are drooling for. You will be charged based on the value it delivers. People will be start making trade offs on if hiring humans would be cheaper than AI, etc. There's no way they're going to leave all that money on the table when there is all that investment to pay back.

z3t4 6mo ago

Programming is an abstraction of the machine code which describe what the computer should do. You could in theory program in prose, meaning the description of the program compiles into an app.

nadine1988 6mo ago

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machuz 6mo ago

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edwardsrobbie 6mo ago

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cat-turner 6mo ago

I think what people don't realize is that rent and the mortgage isn't paid through art. It's paid through boring, important work that is mostly uncreative and requires precision. A lot of people don't really care about doing anything innovative, they just want to do something to get money to sustain their life. The same goes for businesses. What a lot of people don't realize about software is that it is one of the few industries that offered a means to greatly improve your standard of living without requiring a formal degree. AI just one-shotted that kind of work. There will always be a place for humans to do creative things, but there won't be a place for average people to make a living. Example - look at animated movies. In the past studios hired hundreds of people to draw the movie. Now, its nearly all automated with software. The need for human artistic ability for commercial work is nearly gone, and only left for nice to have products. In 5 years we will see the same for software. It will be much faster than what happened to art because software is already in nearly every aspect of life.

jmull 6mo ago

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. I'm sure it will be possible, but it may well be very expensive. If it is, why would anyone spend the resources? AI evolution will certainly follow the money, which is not necessarily the same as the path to AGI.

OutOfHere 6mo ago

It's a horrific article that starts off wrong by equating specification with code. In reality, the relevance of a specification comes with substantial abstraction that its author doesn't care about. The goodness of a spec is not just from what is defined, but also from what is left out. Code on the other hand leaves nothing out, unless you get into compiler level optimizations. The two are not the same.

clawbridge 6mo ago

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