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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Since 2017? You're still wet behind the ears!

It tells me I need to get out because it represents a shift to a higher level of abstraction in programming. In the ideal I hear expressed, instead of programming you'd be just describing the code you want and letting someone/thing else do it for you.

That's management, not programming. I want to program.

Understand that I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with that. It's just that it indicates that the things that I enjoy about being a programmer are the things that are being optimized away.

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> It tells me I need to get out because it represents a shift to a higher level of abstraction in programming. In the ideal I hear expressed, instead of programming you'd be just describing the code you want and letting someone/thing else do it for you.

To me, LLMs are just "advanced" (read: statistical) codegen, unlike compilers and interpreters that are deterministic (should generate functionally equivalent code). But there's as much novelty there as there was when the C compiler or LISP repl was introduced.

> To me, LLMs are just "advanced" (read: statistical) codegen, unlike compilers and interpreters that are deterministic

That's fair, although I would disagree with the notion that compilers are code generators.

But using code generators is not something that is interesting to me even a little. They remove much of what interests me about programming. So your explanation -- while it makes sense and I wouldn't argue that you should feel any differently -- underlines that I need to get out of this industry.

I'm somewhat mixed. From what I've used, for relatively high level boilerplate code, the stuff I hate, it's okay with. For anything more complex, there are a lot of mistakes, and you still have to understand the technical and the domain to spot the mistakes. I think it will be all that much harder to become skilled as AI generated code becomes more common, because fewer relatively speaking, developers will be able to spot said errors and correct for them.

It's hard enough to keep up with PR reviews of a half dozen developers while doing my own work now. Hard to imagine that with 3-4x the output.

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