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Comment by manithree | Hacker News Reader

I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk.

Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.

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I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.

Was a "to do" list the example they used at that time also?

Funnily enough todo lists didn’t really become a popular app category until the early 2000s. CASE tools in particular were very focused on enterprise applications.

Nah, that came later as the canonical example, with Ruby on Rails (which also somewhat suffered from a "programmers are irrelevant now" meme). Rails would make todo apps and twitter clones too cheap to meter (pretty much all Rails tutorials involved making one or the other in like an hour, pretty much entirely in the DSL).

In practice, Rails, while quite nice, was not the productivity revolution that it was originally touted as. These things never are.

I remember sitting in my first year university classes, in 2003, and we were given quite the opposite outlook - don't limit ourselves to what we consider to be 'the industry' as it is right now, because most of the jobs we'll have in our careers don't yet exist.

LOL... I was in the same position. I graduated from high school in 88 and got my first job a couple of years later, working at a small insurance company running IBM AS/400. I had just gotten my job as an operator with a dream of becoming a programmer, and here comes IBM with its CASE tool. I truly thought the world was going to end.

A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic, and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder.

All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises." Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes. Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs going away? No.

A good LLM is a great tool for those who know what they are doing. They can follow some very tedious code paths (if thread 1 is doing this, while thread 4 while thread 2...). However they also can write some really really bad code. They sometimes propose bad solutions/architecture. You need someone knowledge to guide them and keep them on a good path.

Back in the 80's there were ads for tools to "dinosaurs" who everyone looked to when their 4GL language failed to solve the problem.

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