Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

spaceman_2020

I’ve never seen a profession change so fast as coding right now

View on HN

Don’t worry, it’s not. Just people doing busy work and spending time struggling their “tools” to make something useful.

Coding isn’t the first profession to be disrupted by automation and it won’t be the last

Wait until automation is itself automated.

Have to keep in mind that what is happening now is basically what was promised decades ago. Never mind 4GL, 5GL, expert systems, and other efforts that went nowhere... even COBOL was created with the intention of making programming look more like natural language.

Often, revolutions take longer to happen than we think they will, and then they happen faster than we think they will. And when the tipping point is finally reached, we find more people pushing back than we thought there would be.

I believe high level languages will be replaced by natural human language, the same way as low level languages replaced by high level languages. It is the natural evolution of development.

On the other hand agentic teams will take over solo agents.

> I believe high level languages will be replaced by natural human languageI believe high level languages will be replaced by natural human language

Ask any human client buying dev work from a web agency how "natural language" spec works out for them.

It's not clear to me at all that "natural language" alone is ideal -- unless you also have near real time iteration of builds. If you do, then the build is a concrete manifestation of the spec, and the natural language can say "but that's not what I meant".

This allows messy natural language to vector towards the solution, "I'll know it when I see it" style.

So, natural language shaping iteratively convergent builds.

Is that your actual believe? That non-formal, natural human language explaining the task will replace formal programming?

Things seem to be heading in the direction of using formal languages to define deterministic behaviour and natural languages to express matters of human taste.

If you zoom out, it does seem like the most natural thing - why should humans with finite memory and context better than an all knowing machine?

OK but is it leading to either better or more plentiful software? That's the step that people keep seeming to miss here.

I think it is actually going to happen verrrrry slowly. but it will happen. Many many of my colleagues are understandably resisting. it will take a long time to balance out.

Meh. What I’m doing with coding agents is what I’ve been doing for years: TDD except I use prose to describe what I want instead of writing every line of code and then spend more time in review/qa

> except I use prose to describe what I want instead of writing every line of code

Exactly.

And yet the output isn't noticeably different from 5 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com