4 ms·

> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone wa

> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know. Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist. The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.

ttoinou 3mo ago
Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there
- sublinear 3mo ago
  Lots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".
  - ttoinou 3mo ago
    If it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
  Sure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve
  - ttoinou 3mo ago
    With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI Juniors now need to be more skilled than before
    - ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
      > the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something? > spin up and manage dozens of juniors Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.
      - ttoinou 3mo ago
        What if your junior is contacted by a three letter agency ? He will be legally forced in the USA to follow their direction and not your instruction. LLM are so powerful exactly because they can interpret unstructured inputs in so many ways, prompt injection is a feature not a bug
        ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
        Why do you think an LLM is following only your instructions? Unless maybe you are in a tiny minority running locally
dataviz1000 3mo ago
> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.
- hnuser123456 3mo ago
  Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible. A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
  - dataviz1000 3mo ago
    > but they only became more important to understand how they worked Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations. A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding. Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain. [0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/ https://adamsohn.com/clap/
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
  I don't see it. 1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it? 2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ...... 3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)

ttoinou 3mo ago

Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there

sublinear 3mo ago
Lots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".
- ttoinou 3mo ago
  If it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience
ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
Sure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve
- ttoinou 3mo ago
  With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI Juniors now need to be more skilled than before
  - ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
    > the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something? > spin up and manage dozens of juniors Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.
    - ttoinou 3mo ago
      What if your junior is contacted by a three letter agency ? He will be legally forced in the USA to follow their direction and not your instruction. LLM are so powerful exactly because they can interpret unstructured inputs in so many ways, prompt injection is a feature not a bug
      - ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
        Why do you think an LLM is following only your instructions? Unless maybe you are in a tiny minority running locally

dataviz1000 3mo ago

> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.

hnuser123456 3mo ago
Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible. A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
- dataviz1000 3mo ago
  > but they only became more important to understand how they worked Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations. A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding. Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain. [0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/ https://adamsohn.com/clap/
ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
I don't see it. 1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it? 2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ...... 3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)