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I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years. I w
by marcus_holmes 4mo ago
I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.
I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.
And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).
But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.
I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.
- esafak 4mo agoNot only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.
- retired 4mo agoAs a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
- AussieWog93 4mo agoI'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.
- aspenmartin 4mo agoIdk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.
- ares623 4mo agoif you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?
- aspenmartin 4mo agoGood thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai https://epoch.ai (like the first box) Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant: 3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50 So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch. One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.
- zzzeek 4mo agoYou can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
- aspenmartin 4mo agoYea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad? Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?
- api 4mo agoI wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
- jerf 4mo agoI entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoMy first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services). And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.
- jerf 4mo agoYeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process. I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch. My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zzzeek 4mo agoSure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoI saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life. Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.
- joeyguerra 4mo agoI already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago[flagged]
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoI don't want to get into the argument here, so won't respond.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago[flagged]
- conception 4mo agoThere are lots of MLM and pyramid schemes worth billions of dollars. Doesn’t means they aren’t scams.
- OutOfHere 4mo agoThe stock market is one, although a regulated one. Crypto projects don't define their price, only their emission schedule. One doesn't buy without an understanding of the schedule. There are laws that are enforced against crypto rugpulls. Fundamentally there is no scam with the large crypto projects.
- botfriendsarent 4mo ago[flagged]
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoAn Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all. I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it. So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then. We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then. I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now. [0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here.
- botfriendsarent 4mo agoMore useful than a working accounting system? Because of the disaster of screen resolutions, mobile form factors and all the previous dishonesty inherent in the past 30 years of software development? That must be really useful. The machines are not the problem. UI layout was solved 40 years ago on all windowed and non windowed platforms. Mobile breakpoints are not special. How about the browser as a "failed platform"? Seems to fit! Hardware is irrelevant.
- 4mo ago
- TimXare 4mo ago[dead]
- kazinator 4mo agoOP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.) This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech. Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoThanks for the clarification. To use your example; if the next version of the C++ language was switching to interpreted and compiled C++ was becoming an obsolete thing of the past, then I would expect every forum discussing C++ to be discussing this change. Trying to exclude that topic and still read interesting news about C++ would be very difficult, obviously, because everyone would be expressing their opinion on that change. LLMs are the biggest change in the tech industry for ~50 years. It's not a separate tech (like C++ and Angular) it's a fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board. Yes you can still hand-code software (in the same way that in the example you could still compile C++) but the entire industry is moving in a different direction, and trying to ignore that seems quixotic. Obviously, everyone is entitled to ignore whatever they want, so good luck to OP. I hope they find their source of non-AI tech news.
- kazinator 4mo ago> It's not a separate tech Yes it is. > fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board Whether you produce your code using "ed" on a hard copy printer TTY, or use an IDE, is off topic in a C++ forum. The way you develop software is a specific topic: the way-you-develop-software topic. Someone not interested in that topic should be able to easily filter that out from their feed, like any other topic.