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Comment by pgsandstrom | Hacker News Reader

My uncle started coding at a young age with punch card programming. He says that a developer was at least a hundred times more productive at the end of his career than in the beginning. And still, it did not result in the death of the programmer.

We are a long way from AIs that can operate independently. And until then the AI will just be a productivity tool. Maybe we will all become a hundred times more productive, and it will still not be the end of the programmer.

The real threat that I see is that the AI will leave the boring part to us: The code review of AI work. If I see this development I will plan for an early retirement.

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At one of my very first programming jobs (during the first dot com boom) an older developer took me aside and said “I’m going to tell you the single biggest productivity enhancer I learned in my entire career, ‘always number your punch cards’”.

I think he meant it just as a joke but it’s actually stuck with me as pretty valuable. At one point in his career being a programmer was as much about manipulating paper cards as it was systems thinking.

At some point in the future manipulating text may not be a central job of a programmer, but I doubt systems thinking gets replaced anytime soon by currently understood technologies.

I remember people claiming intellisense style code completion would be the end of developers, but I’m sure there are more developers now than when it was introduced.

Have you tried to use GPT with some specific requests for functions or classes? Then if you find an error, just tell them to fix it?

Ok but where is the AI that generates me those specific requests and finds the error and then tells the AI to fix it?

> The real threat that I see is that the AI will leave the boring part to us

Do you enjoy writing code just for the sake of writing code? The thing I enjoy about programming is the results of the programming. Code is just the language I have to speak in order to get the idea that's in my head onto the computer screen. If I could just speak English and have the same result, I would be just as happy.

Interesting. I was going to say something trivial like making the AI insert semicolons and fix typos in sloppily written code but now I wonder if this AI can be used to detect undefined behavior just by throwing the Linux kernel source into it.

Maybe it could be used to decompile code and automatically give it meaningful variable and type names.

I think the AI will actually leave us with the exiting part instead. I'm already seeing this with CoPilot and ChatGPT.

I was really hyped when I asked ChatGPT to write some classes to encode some data, everything seemmed magical when the code was outputing and making sense to me at first glance.

But when a tried it didn't work and spent an hour tryin to fix it.

Then I decided to write my own code and stop wasting time.

I don't usually copy blocks of code they produce verbatim, it's either line-by-line work (CoPilot) when I check every line - the same way I check my own lines - or I just take rough ideas (ChatGPT). The main good thing is - it makes me think more about what I'm doing, like a second mind (granted not a very bright one, but with a vast knowledge database).

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