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Comment by tangjurine | Hacker News Reader

The author isn't a professional programmer. He has a couple side projects and doesn't seem very good at coding.

He is. Later in the article he explains a task he did during the working day to his wife. It seemed like his employer uses some sort of custom tableview control, or he was working on a business report. Honestly it sounded like the bigger threat to that particular task was someone finding an open source library that did it already, but it illustrated the point and the story was nicely written.

The author is very obviously the caliber of writer you'd expect for someone who regularly writes prose for the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

And also, apparently, the level of programmer you'd expect of someone who regularly writes prose for the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

Yeah there's lot's of people in this thread who didn't read the full article and the conclusion the Author comes to.

I saw someone say they stopped reading after this line:

> At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling.

...and I don't fault them for doing so and making the assumption that the author is not an experienced coder

That’s interesting. I think there’s a real shift going on in terms of what coding actually means I’ve never produced so much code so quickly and it’s disconcerting to the part of me that wants to feel like I earned the outcome on a pretty deep level because I can just generate shit that works so fast and then just edit it until I get exactly what I’m looking for and it feels like cheating in a weird way.

I still don’t feel that way about front end frameworks for the web. Oh my God what what are people doing?

Honestly, this reminds me of my early days when auto-complete and OOP was the best thing. It's why OOP proliferated, you type in the name of the object and get a list of completions in visual studio. No need to read docs or understand what you are doing, just find the method you need on that object. This new copilot coding reminds me of that, throwing shit and see what sticks, without understanding why and how it works. I can't help to shake the thought that we will see heaps of mediocre code cranked out that just about works, even though the problem maybe required a tenth of that to solve it.

> I can't help to shake the thought that we will see heaps of mediocre code cranked out that just about works, even though the problem maybe required a tenth of that to solve it.

That’s just more of the same, isn’t it? IMO that’s already the current state of the industry.

I think you're right.

Terrifying, what will be the towering class hierarchies and template hell that fall out of LLM powered coding? More importantly, what will be the better approaches that we should take to avoid creating a quagmire of unmaintainable code?

> The author isn't a professional programmer.

The author asserts that he is a professional programmer as one of his day jobs, as well as handling the “serious programming” in his hobby projects with a mostly-hardware guy who is also an ex-professional-programmer, but whose coding skills are out-of-date.

His LinkedIn has nothing more current than Jan 2017 at Genius, and that role (one of only two jobs with what looks like an IC-like title, “Developer”, that lasted more than a couple months), has a description that indicates it wasn't mostly an IC position but drifting among recruiting, acting product lead, PM, and something like an assistant to the CEO roles.

He really has a resume that screams of having decent communications skills and professional network (and maybe manangement skills) and wanting to be seen as a programmer but consistently either needing to find a way out of an environment or into a different role in the same org before the checks his communications skills wrote that his tech skills couldn't back caught up to him.

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