Comment by karmasimida | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmasimida | Hacker News Reader

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While I understand why you feel this way, the meaning or standing of being a programmer is different now. It feels like the purpose is lost or it longer belongs to human.

But below is reality talk. With Claude 3.5, I already think it is a better programmer than I at micro level tasks, and a better Leetcode programmer than I could ever be.

I think it is like modern car manufacturering, the robots build most of the components, but I can’t see how human could be dismissed from the process to oversee output.

O3 has been very impressive in achieving 70+ in swebench for example, but this also means when it is trained on the codebase multiple times so visibility isn't an issue yet it still has 30% chance that it can’t pass the unit tests.

A fully autonomous system can’t be trusted, the economy of software won’t collapse, but it will be transformed beyond our imagination now.

I will for sure miss the days when writing code, or coder is still a real business.

How time flies

Developer. Prompt Engineer. Philosopher-Builder. (mostly) not programmer.

The code part will get smaller and smaller for most folks. Some frameworks or bare-metal people or intense heavy-lifters will still do manual code or pair-programming where half the pair is an agentic AI with super-human knowledge of your org's code base.

But this will be a layer of abstraction for most people who build software. And as someone who hates rote learning, I'm here for it. IMO.

Unfortunately (?) I think the 10-20-50? years of development experience you might bring to bear on the problems can be superseded by an LLM finetuned on stackoverflow, github etc once judgement and haystack are truly nailed. Because it can have all that knowledge you have accumulated, and soaked into a semi-conscious instinct that you use so well you aren't even aware of it except that it works. It can have that a million times over. Actually. Which is both amazing and terrifying. Currently this isn't obvious because it's accuracy /judgement to learn all those life-of-a-dev lessons is almost non-existent. Currently. But it will happen. That is copilot's future. It's raison d'être.

I would argue what it will never have however, simply by function of the size of training runs is unique functional drive and vision. If you wanted a "Steve Jobs" AI you would have to build it. And if you gave it instructions to make a prompt/framework to build a "Jobs" it would just be an imitation, rather than a new unique in-context version. That is the value a person has- their particular filter, their passion and personal framework. Someone who doesn't have any of those things, they had better be hoping for UBI and charity. Or go live a simple life, outside the rat race.

bows

I'm hoping it's similar to the abacus for maths, the elimination of human "calculators" like on the apollo missions, and we just ended up moving onto different, harder, more abstract problems, and forget that we ever had to climb such small hills. AI's evolution and integration is more multifaceted though and much more unpredictable.

But unlike the abacus/calculators i don't feel like we're at a point in history where society is getting wiser and more empathetic, and these new abilities are going towards something good.

But supervisors of tasks will remain because we're social, untrusting, and employers will always want someone else to blame for their shortcomings. And humans will stay in the chain at least for marketing and promotion/reputation because we like our japanese craftsman and our amg motors made by one person.

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