5 ms·

The beginning of programming as we'll know it?

62 points by zdw 7mo ago

chiengineer2 7mo ago
[flagged]
hyperhello 7mo ago
My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn! Attitude as old as time itself.
  - hyperhello 7mo ago
    You mock, but not very persuasively. You seem to be relying on a silly idea you don't even believe in: that someone, once, made fun of C programming.
    - operatingthetan 7mo ago
      >AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.
      - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
        The AI does not, in fact, produce working code.
      - recursive 7mo ago
        I believe that someone can get it to produce working code. Whenever I press the button though, I'm not getting great results.
    - napsec 7mo ago
      I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.
      - SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
        I have some bad news for you
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.
      - skydhash 7mo ago
        Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft. Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow). I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
        signatoremo 7mo ago
        > I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. This is remarkably sloppy for someone who codes. No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence.
        skydhash 7mo ago
        > No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence Strong opinions, loosely held. What I’ve seen seems to confirm that opinion, so I’m still holding on to it.
        mikkupikku 7mo ago
        > Strong opinions, loosely held. Yes doctor, but enough about my stool.
        mikkupikku 7mo ago
  - Chinjut 7mo ago
    Yes, "An LLM is just a new higher level programming language", sure. A new programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them. (Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)
    - bitwize 7mo ago
      (And the behavior of any given C implementation is completely defined.)
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      It used to be that old farts made a big deal out of knowing the ins and outs of assembly programming and sneered at the kids who only knew "high level" languages like C, why, those damn kids didn't even understand the machine code their compilers emitted, didn't even know or care that it was so obviously suboptimal. Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.
  - dtagames 7mo ago
    Right? Some of us used to read hex digits off printed paper dumps to debug mainframe memory (like me), but we can be excited about AI and embrace it, too. From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
- qsera 7mo ago
  I think it should be called dice-coding, not vibe-coding. You roll the LLM dice, and sometimes it comes with the right looking program on the top. Since the dice is loaded heavily, this happens quite often. This makes people think that the dice can program.
- martin-t 7mo ago
  Sorry to see you're getting mocked. I hate both the (current) low quality and the exploitation aspects of AI more than anyone. However, I don't understand your post. What is real coding according to you?
  - hyperhello 7mo ago
    Learning to code (I don't require it to be machine code) involves mastering a level of abstract thinking that is sufficient to make the computer do what you want. It's more than pushing A to make Mario jump, it's more than learning how to put a SUM() on an excel column, and it's more than typing "make a program that does this" into ChatGPT. I don't know exactly where the line is, but it's going to involve some level of the kind of suffering and brain lock that higher level thought involves. I'm not a purist on a mountaintop saying tools can't be used effectively during coding. Everyone googles for API parameters, you can just ask ChatGPT how to fix syntax in an unfamiliar language, and you can copy anything you have access to and paste it in, that's all okay. It just isn't what makes you a coder any more than wearing a uniform makes you a cop.
    - martin-t 7mo ago
      That makes sense and I think everyone should learn to code regardless if a machine can automate it because it makes the person better at thinking - which is what really differentiates us from other animals. But I think people object to you saying LLMs are not coding. Using them certainly does not help the person using them think the same way making all the decisions while writing the code. But even if LLMs are a Chinese room, if they could produce the same output as a human (given the same goal and information context), they IMO would be coding.
julianlam 7mo ago
> Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win. For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  These posts are just programmers trying to understand their new place in the hierarchy. I'm in the same place and get it, but also truisms like 'will always win' is basically just throwing a wild guess at what the future will look like. A better attitude is to attempt to catch the wave.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - TacticalCoder 7mo ago
    TFA's author is literally saying it may happen. He's using AI so he already caught the wave. He's augmenting himself with AI tools. He's not saying "AI will never surpass humans at writing programs". He writes: " At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through." You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why. We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day. To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, TODAY*, shortcomings. TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      To be fair, the author phrased his point poorly in a way that invites confusion: > "But for now, real programmers will always win." "for now ... always", not a good phrasing.
ma2kx 7mo ago
In chess, engines have long been stronger than humans, but for a long time a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone.
- theteapot 7mo ago
  Roughly 20y DeepBlue to AlphaZero. I don't think that is comparable though. Use of deep neural networks was what made the machines starting with AlphaZero dominant again. I.e. we're already in the new paradigm.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
  > a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone. any examples? I'd love to watch how that went
  - ma2kx 7mo ago
    Here is a Match where Nakamura played with Rybka against Stockfish from 2014: https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-3634 https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... And here Nakamura still reached 4.5:3.5 vs Komodo in 2016 https://www.chess.com/news/view/komodo-beats-nakamura-in-final-battle-1331 https://www.chess.com/news/view/komodo-beats-nakamura-in-fin... Hikaru surely has more matches like that, but I don't know if they can be found in chess databases or if they were only streamed on YouTube.
    - NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
      that's human+odds vs pc GP was talking about pc+human vs pc
      - ma2kx 7mo ago
        https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-3634 https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... > In comparision, Nakamura had the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less than Stockfish's 3200+ rating), and it ran on a 2008 MacBook. Of course, he also had his 20-plus years of chess knowledge in play.
satisfice 7mo ago
‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.” This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias. Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
fraywing 7mo ago
I'm observing that there is some kind of status quo bias nearly uniformly being surfaced by the programming community right now. I myself have feelings like this, as a software engineer by trade. "We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium.
- georgemcbay 7mo ago
  > "We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium. Yeah no shade to the author, it was a well written piece, but these arguments increasingly seem like a form of self-soothing to me. On current trajectories I don't see how AI won't swallow up the majority of the software development field in ways that completely devalue not just software engineers, but everyone up the stack in software-focused companies, eventually removing the need for most of the companies to even exist. (Why have a software company employing someone who is an expert at gathering customer requirements to feed to the LLM when the customer can just solve their own problem with an LLM? They'll build the wrong thing the first time... and the fifth time... and maybe the tenth time... but it'll still be way faster for them to iterate their own solution than to interface with another human). It'll take longer for senior engineers to suffer than juniors, and longer for system architects to suffer than senior engineers, and so on up the chain but I'm just not seeing this magical demarcation line that a lot of people seem to think is going to materialize prior to the rising tide of AI starting to go above their own neck. And this is likely to all happen very quickly, it was less than a year ago when LLMs were awful at producing code.
an0malous 7mo ago
> If you interpret these examples to mean that any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs, and the AI will consistently produce a satisfactory product, then I’d agree programmers are toast. I think the road to this is pretty clear now. It’s all about building the harness now such that the AI can write something and get feedback from type checks, automated tests, runtime errors, logs, and other observability tools. The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs.
- kami23 7mo ago
  I am also of this opinion that a lot of this can be solved in time with a harness. And whole heartedly agree that there is a class of webapp that has been trivialized that can make a mom and pop shop up to 'enterprise' (80% of our architecture seems to center around the same pattern at my $DAYJOB) run just fine if they accept some of the vibes. This type of works seems to be happening as a lot of orchestrator projects that pop up here every once in a while, and I've just been waiting for one with a pipeline 'language' malleable enough to work for me that I can then make generic enough for a big class of solutions. I feel doomed to make my own, but I feel like I should do my due diligence.
- skydhash 7mo ago
  > The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs. Have you ever look at Debian’s package list? Most CRUD apps are just a step above forms and reports. But there’s a lot of specific processing that requires careful design. The whole system may be tricky to get right as well. But CRUD UI coding was never an issue. DDD and various other architecture books and talks are not about CRUD.
phyzix5761 7mo ago
> any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs Isn't this just a new programming language? A higher level language which will require new experts to know how to get the best results out of it? I've seen non-technical people struggle with AI generated code because they don't understand all the little nuances that go into building a simple web app.
- Chinjut 7mo ago
  A programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them.
trimethylpurine 7mo ago
Good read.
markus_zhang 7mo ago
For anyone who relies on their knowledge of business, of taking requirements, know that eventually your customers will be at least as good as you on this skill. After all they are asking questions. And they are not dumb ass who don’t learn. They are also motivated to learn to adapt to AI. IMO the best value of humans right now is to provide skills, as fuel of the future. Once we burn up then the new age shall come.
- galaxyLogic 7mo ago
  I think customers will say: "I don't want to try to come up with (correct) requirements. I rather hire this SW firm that specializes in that skill. What is often overlooked is that we are not trying to just produce programs, we are trying to produce "systems", which means systems where computers and humans interact beneficially. In the early days of computers, "System Analyst" was a very cool job-description. I think it will make a comeback with AI.
  - skydhash 7mo ago
    > What is often overlooked is that we are not trying to just produce programs, we are trying to produce "systems", which means systems where computers and humans interact beneficially People do overlook that. Software is written to solve a problem. And it interacts with other software and data from the real world. Everything is in flux. Which is why you need both technical expertise (how things work) and domain knowledge (the purpose of things) to react properly to changes. Creating such systems is costly (even in the AI edge), which is why businesses delegate parts that are not their core business to someone else.
adamredwoods 7mo ago
>> The computers will come for all of our jobs eventually, but those of us who refuse or decline to embrace the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever been given will be the first to fall. It's being mandated by almost all companies. We're forced to use it, whether it produces good results or not. I can change a one-line code faster than Claude Code can, as long as I understand the code. Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What am I embracing?
- theonething 7mo ago
  > I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What about code that other (human) engineers write? Do you not understand that code too because you didn't write it?
  - galaxyLogic 7mo ago
    Intersting observation. There is a difference however. Pre-AI each human programmer understood the code they wrote, in general. So there were many humans who understood some part of the code. Poast-AI there will be no humans who understand any code, presumably. Sure we will understand its syntax, but the overall architecture of applications may be so complicated that no human can understand it, in practice.
    - martin-t 7mo ago
      Have you read Coding machines[0]? BTW, that guy received an Oscar for coding. Oh, far far have we fallen since those days and how far we have yet to go... [0]: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
- martin-t 7mo ago
  You're not embracing it, you're forced to accept it because the nature of employer-employee relationships has a fundamental power differential which makes it exploitative. You helped build the company, you should own a proportional part of it. The issue with the current system is that only the people who provide money, not the people who provide work, get to own the result. Work (and natural resources) is where value comes from. Their money came from work as well but not only their work, they were in a position of power which allowed them to get a larger cut than deserved. Ownership should, by law, be distributed according to the amount and skill level of work. Then people wouldn't worry about losing their jobs to automation - because they'd keep receiving dividends from the value of their previous work. If their previous work allowed the company to buy a robot to replace them, great, they now get the revenue from the robot's work while being free to pursue other things in their now free time. If their previous work allowed an LLM to be trained or rented to replace them, great, they get get the revenue from the LLM's work...
11217mackem 7mo ago
logic, rigor, judgement and taste
martin-t 7mo ago
> Speaking of goodness, I share the majority opinion that AI is generally good I would like to know how the author concluded that this is the majority opinion.
anal_reactor 7mo ago
I have a friend. He's very passionate about trains, and he worked his entire career in and around them. Some time ago we had an incident where entire railway in the region had to be shut down for some time because the computer managing the traffic broke. Big fuckup because lots of people rely on railway. My friend instantly started complaining with visible satisfaction "See? Computers are shit! Back in my days everything was done manually and that was great! We never had such outages!". What my friend is incapable of understanding is that it's simply not possible to manage traffic at scale using humans, and it's much better and safer to do this using computers. When he was young, there was much less traffic, and delays were much more frequent. The core issue is that he doesn't really understand computers, and because he's old, there's no chance he'll learn a new technology, so he's very distrustful towards computers. Not to mention that modern UX is about enshittification, so it does take some skill to navigate the technology, especially mobile - he trips over things that I consider extremely basic like "this is an ad, don't click this". I have a similar feeling when reading discussions about AI on this website. Most people here refuse to appreciate AI because "back in my days...". Well, the future is here, old man, adapt or perish. Programming using AI is a completely new paradigm that requires completely new approach and new skills. Either you learn them or you'll be left behind, whether you like it or not - back in 2010's all you had to do to get a lucrative software job was to show that you knew how to use google because most people refused that. I suspect that when the dust settles, something similar will happen with AI, and people who know how to extract maximum value from it will be rewarded handsomely.
auggierose 7mo ago
> The computers will come for all of our jobs eventually, but those of us who refuse or decline to embrace the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever been given will be the first to fall. The most powerful creative tool I've ever been given is my body, including my brain. Yeah, AI is cool, too.
martin-t 7mo ago
> The time may come, perhaps even soon, when AI takes over programming completely. But in the mean time, a programmer who embraces AI, yet is skeptical about everything it creates, is better-equipped than any comparably-skilled human in programming history. The premise is flawed. Your company has 3 layers: workers - managers - owners. When AI (actual AI, not "AI") takes over, that'll change into 2 layers: AI - owners. How you're equipped doesn't matter because you're out of the picture. Not economically viable. Irrelevant.
tasuki 7mo ago
> But people are less likely to share all the times the AI failed in some ridiculous way. I have not noticed this: people love sharing AI failing in ridiculous ways.

62 points by zdw 7mo ago

[flagged]

My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.

mikkupikku 7mo ago
My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn! Attitude as old as time itself.
- hyperhello 7mo ago
  You mock, but not very persuasively. You seem to be relying on a silly idea you don't even believe in: that someone, once, made fun of C programming.
  - operatingthetan 7mo ago
    >AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.
    - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
      The AI does not, in fact, produce working code.
    - recursive 7mo ago
      I believe that someone can get it to produce working code. Whenever I press the button though, I'm not getting great results.
  - napsec 7mo ago
    I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.
    - SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
      I have some bad news for you
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.
    - skydhash 7mo ago
      Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft. Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow). I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
      - signatoremo 7mo ago
        > I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. This is remarkably sloppy for someone who codes. No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence.
        skydhash 7mo ago
        > No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence Strong opinions, loosely held. What I’ve seen seems to confirm that opinion, so I’m still holding on to it.
        mikkupikku 7mo ago
        > Strong opinions, loosely held. Yes doctor, but enough about my stool.
      - mikkupikku 7mo ago
- Chinjut 7mo ago
  Yes, "An LLM is just a new higher level programming language", sure. A new programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them. (Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)
  - bitwize 7mo ago
    (And the behavior of any given C implementation is completely defined.)
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    It used to be that old farts made a big deal out of knowing the ins and outs of assembly programming and sneered at the kids who only knew "high level" languages like C, why, those damn kids didn't even understand the machine code their compilers emitted, didn't even know or care that it was so obviously suboptimal. Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.
- dtagames 7mo ago
  Right? Some of us used to read hex digits off printed paper dumps to debug mainframe memory (like me), but we can be excited about AI and embrace it, too. From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
qsera 7mo ago
I think it should be called dice-coding, not vibe-coding. You roll the LLM dice, and sometimes it comes with the right looking program on the top. Since the dice is loaded heavily, this happens quite often. This makes people think that the dice can program.
martin-t 7mo ago
Sorry to see you're getting mocked. I hate both the (current) low quality and the exploitation aspects of AI more than anyone. However, I don't understand your post. What is real coding according to you?
- hyperhello 7mo ago
  Learning to code (I don't require it to be machine code) involves mastering a level of abstract thinking that is sufficient to make the computer do what you want. It's more than pushing A to make Mario jump, it's more than learning how to put a SUM() on an excel column, and it's more than typing "make a program that does this" into ChatGPT. I don't know exactly where the line is, but it's going to involve some level of the kind of suffering and brain lock that higher level thought involves. I'm not a purist on a mountaintop saying tools can't be used effectively during coding. Everyone googles for API parameters, you can just ask ChatGPT how to fix syntax in an unfamiliar language, and you can copy anything you have access to and paste it in, that's all okay. It just isn't what makes you a coder any more than wearing a uniform makes you a cop.
  - martin-t 7mo ago
    That makes sense and I think everyone should learn to code regardless if a machine can automate it because it makes the person better at thinking - which is what really differentiates us from other animals. But I think people object to you saying LLMs are not coding. Using them certainly does not help the person using them think the same way making all the decisions while writing the code. But even if LLMs are a Chinese room, if they could produce the same output as a human (given the same goal and information context), they IMO would be coding.

julianlam 7mo ago

> Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win. For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.

operatingthetan 7mo ago
These posts are just programmers trying to understand their new place in the hierarchy. I'm in the same place and get it, but also truisms like 'will always win' is basically just throwing a wild guess at what the future will look like. A better attitude is to attempt to catch the wave.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  TFA's author is literally saying it may happen. He's using AI so he already caught the wave. He's augmenting himself with AI tools. He's not saying "AI will never surpass humans at writing programs". He writes: " At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through." You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why. We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day. To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, TODAY*, shortcomings. TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    To be fair, the author phrased his point poorly in a way that invites confusion: > "But for now, real programmers will always win." "for now ... always", not a good phrasing.

ma2kx 7mo ago

In chess, engines have long been stronger than humans, but for a long time a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone.

theteapot 7mo ago
Roughly 20y DeepBlue to AlphaZero. I don't think that is comparable though. Use of deep neural networks was what made the machines starting with AlphaZero dominant again. I.e. we're already in the new paradigm.
NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
> a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone. any examples? I'd love to watch how that went
- ma2kx 7mo ago
  Here is a Match where Nakamura played with Rybka against Stockfish from 2014: https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-3634 https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... And here Nakamura still reached 4.5:3.5 vs Komodo in 2016 https://www.chess.com/news/view/komodo-beats-nakamura-in-final-battle-1331 https://www.chess.com/news/view/komodo-beats-nakamura-in-fin... Hikaru surely has more matches like that, but I don't know if they can be found in chess databases or if they were only streamed on YouTube.
  - NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
    that's human+odds vs pc GP was talking about pc+human vs pc
    - ma2kx 7mo ago
      https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-3634 https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... > In comparision, Nakamura had the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less than Stockfish's 3200+ rating), and it ran on a 2008 MacBook. Of course, he also had his 20-plus years of chess knowledge in play.

satisfice 7mo ago

‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.” This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias. Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.

fraywing 7mo ago

I'm observing that there is some kind of status quo bias nearly uniformly being surfaced by the programming community right now. I myself have feelings like this, as a software engineer by trade. "We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium.

georgemcbay 7mo ago
> "We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium. Yeah no shade to the author, it was a well written piece, but these arguments increasingly seem like a form of self-soothing to me. On current trajectories I don't see how AI won't swallow up the majority of the software development field in ways that completely devalue not just software engineers, but everyone up the stack in software-focused companies, eventually removing the need for most of the companies to even exist. (Why have a software company employing someone who is an expert at gathering customer requirements to feed to the LLM when the customer can just solve their own problem with an LLM? They'll build the wrong thing the first time... and the fifth time... and maybe the tenth time... but it'll still be way faster for them to iterate their own solution than to interface with another human). It'll take longer for senior engineers to suffer than juniors, and longer for system architects to suffer than senior engineers, and so on up the chain but I'm just not seeing this magical demarcation line that a lot of people seem to think is going to materialize prior to the rising tide of AI starting to go above their own neck. And this is likely to all happen very quickly, it was less than a year ago when LLMs were awful at producing code.

an0malous 7mo ago

> If you interpret these examples to mean that any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs, and the AI will consistently produce a satisfactory product, then I’d agree programmers are toast. I think the road to this is pretty clear now. It’s all about building the harness now such that the AI can write something and get feedback from type checks, automated tests, runtime errors, logs, and other observability tools. The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs.

kami23 7mo ago
I am also of this opinion that a lot of this can be solved in time with a harness. And whole heartedly agree that there is a class of webapp that has been trivialized that can make a mom and pop shop up to 'enterprise' (80% of our architecture seems to center around the same pattern at my $DAYJOB) run just fine if they accept some of the vibes. This type of works seems to be happening as a lot of orchestrator projects that pop up here every once in a while, and I've just been waiting for one with a pipeline 'language' malleable enough to work for me that I can then make generic enough for a big class of solutions. I feel doomed to make my own, but I feel like I should do my due diligence.
skydhash 7mo ago
> The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs. Have you ever look at Debian’s package list? Most CRUD apps are just a step above forms and reports. But there’s a lot of specific processing that requires careful design. The whole system may be tricky to get right as well. But CRUD UI coding was never an issue. DDD and various other architecture books and talks are not about CRUD.

phyzix5761 7mo ago

> any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs Isn't this just a new programming language? A higher level language which will require new experts to know how to get the best results out of it? I've seen non-technical people struggle with AI generated code because they don't understand all the little nuances that go into building a simple web app.

Chinjut 7mo ago
A programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them.

trimethylpurine 7mo ago

Good read.

markus_zhang 7mo ago

For anyone who relies on their knowledge of business, of taking requirements, know that eventually your customers will be at least as good as you on this skill. After all they are asking questions. And they are not dumb ass who don’t learn. They are also motivated to learn to adapt to AI. IMO the best value of humans right now is to provide skills, as fuel of the future. Once we burn up then the new age shall come.

galaxyLogic 7mo ago
I think customers will say: "I don't want to try to come up with (correct) requirements. I rather hire this SW firm that specializes in that skill. What is often overlooked is that we are not trying to just produce programs, we are trying to produce "systems", which means systems where computers and humans interact beneficially. In the early days of computers, "System Analyst" was a very cool job-description. I think it will make a comeback with AI.
- skydhash 7mo ago
  > What is often overlooked is that we are not trying to just produce programs, we are trying to produce "systems", which means systems where computers and humans interact beneficially People do overlook that. Software is written to solve a problem. And it interacts with other software and data from the real world. Everything is in flux. Which is why you need both technical expertise (how things work) and domain knowledge (the purpose of things) to react properly to changes. Creating such systems is costly (even in the AI edge), which is why businesses delegate parts that are not their core business to someone else.

adamredwoods 7mo ago

>> The computers will come for all of our jobs eventually, but those of us who refuse or decline to embrace the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever been given will be the first to fall. It's being mandated by almost all companies. We're forced to use it, whether it produces good results or not. I can change a one-line code faster than Claude Code can, as long as I understand the code. Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What am I embracing?

theonething 7mo ago
> I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What about code that other (human) engineers write? Do you not understand that code too because you didn't write it?
- galaxyLogic 7mo ago
  Intersting observation. There is a difference however. Pre-AI each human programmer understood the code they wrote, in general. So there were many humans who understood some part of the code. Poast-AI there will be no humans who understand any code, presumably. Sure we will understand its syntax, but the overall architecture of applications may be so complicated that no human can understand it, in practice.
  - martin-t 7mo ago
    Have you read Coding machines[0]? BTW, that guy received an Oscar for coding. Oh, far far have we fallen since those days and how far we have yet to go... [0]: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
martin-t 7mo ago
You're not embracing it, you're forced to accept it because the nature of employer-employee relationships has a fundamental power differential which makes it exploitative. You helped build the company, you should own a proportional part of it. The issue with the current system is that only the people who provide money, not the people who provide work, get to own the result. Work (and natural resources) is where value comes from. Their money came from work as well but not only their work, they were in a position of power which allowed them to get a larger cut than deserved. Ownership should, by law, be distributed according to the amount and skill level of work. Then people wouldn't worry about losing their jobs to automation - because they'd keep receiving dividends from the value of their previous work. If their previous work allowed the company to buy a robot to replace them, great, they now get the revenue from the robot's work while being free to pursue other things in their now free time. If their previous work allowed an LLM to be trained or rented to replace them, great, they get get the revenue from the LLM's work...

11217mackem 7mo ago

logic, rigor, judgement and taste

martin-t 7mo ago

> Speaking of goodness, I share the majority opinion that AI is generally good I would like to know how the author concluded that this is the majority opinion.

anal_reactor 7mo ago

I have a friend. He's very passionate about trains, and he worked his entire career in and around them. Some time ago we had an incident where entire railway in the region had to be shut down for some time because the computer managing the traffic broke. Big fuckup because lots of people rely on railway. My friend instantly started complaining with visible satisfaction "See? Computers are shit! Back in my days everything was done manually and that was great! We never had such outages!". What my friend is incapable of understanding is that it's simply not possible to manage traffic at scale using humans, and it's much better and safer to do this using computers. When he was young, there was much less traffic, and delays were much more frequent. The core issue is that he doesn't really understand computers, and because he's old, there's no chance he'll learn a new technology, so he's very distrustful towards computers. Not to mention that modern UX is about enshittification, so it does take some skill to navigate the technology, especially mobile - he trips over things that I consider extremely basic like "this is an ad, don't click this". I have a similar feeling when reading discussions about AI on this website. Most people here refuse to appreciate AI because "back in my days...". Well, the future is here, old man, adapt or perish. Programming using AI is a completely new paradigm that requires completely new approach and new skills. Either you learn them or you'll be left behind, whether you like it or not - back in 2010's all you had to do to get a lucrative software job was to show that you knew how to use google because most people refused that. I suspect that when the dust settles, something similar will happen with AI, and people who know how to extract maximum value from it will be rewarded handsomely.

auggierose 7mo ago

> The computers will come for all of our jobs eventually, but those of us who refuse or decline to embrace the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever been given will be the first to fall. The most powerful creative tool I've ever been given is my body, including my brain. Yeah, AI is cool, too.

martin-t 7mo ago

> The time may come, perhaps even soon, when AI takes over programming completely. But in the mean time, a programmer who embraces AI, yet is skeptical about everything it creates, is better-equipped than any comparably-skilled human in programming history. The premise is flawed. Your company has 3 layers: workers - managers - owners. When AI (actual AI, not "AI") takes over, that'll change into 2 layers: AI - owners. How you're equipped doesn't matter because you're out of the picture. Not economically viable. Irrelevant.

tasuki 7mo ago

> But people are less likely to share all the times the AI failed in some ridiculous way. I have not noticed this: people love sharing AI failing in ridiculous ways.