Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? After all, what’s code but a bunch of boring glue and other crap that’s used to prop up a product idea until a few bucks can be extracted from it?

Of course, there’s nothing wiser than tying the entirety of your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x in price as soon as the market is captured).

Is writing solved because LLMs can make something decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of seconds?

I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work — like they’ve been dying to be product managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me. All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes, heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!

> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough?

All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible.

In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day.

I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.

“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you're a stand-up comedian — can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’ It's as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, ‘All right, you're a cook — can you farm?’” —Mitch Hedberg

Agentic programming isn’t engineering: it’s a weird form of management where your workers don’t grow or learn and nobody really understands the system you’re building. That sounds like a hellish, pointless career and it’s not what I got into the field to do. So no thanks: I’ll just keep doing the kind of monkey engineering I find invaluable. Especially while most available models are owned and trained by authoritarian, billionaire, misanthropic cultists.

Fortunately, I am not beholden to some AI-pilled corporation for salary.

Congrats on that.

> In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself.

You can only speak for yourself.

> you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent

I'm really not, though, any more than I "had to" learn JavaScript 20 years ago or blockchains 5 years ago (neither of which I did). Hell, I still use Perl day-to-day.

Good for you! Most people will, though. If I hadn't learnt JavaScript, I couldn't work on a large chunk of the projects that put bread on the table for the past 5-10 years.

If most folks don't learn AI (or its shortcomings and practicalities of it), then they will not be as competitive in the job market. Corpos don't care about the flaws.

That's not really true yet; most of the companies are being a lot more hesitant than individual developers (the companies have legal and TCO worries the devs themselves don't). It's possible what you're describing will become true, but that's not the present

So how will progress be made in our field, in your scenario of the future?

It's both an obvious consequence of how they operate, and an easily observable reality, that even the best models utterly fail at any task that is even slightly outside of the space spanned by their training set. In this future, software in 2022 was as good and as capable as it was ever going to get. In which case -- fuck, I had higher hopes for what computers and software would be able to achieve when I started in this business 20 years ago, than this sorry state of affairs. We were finally getting some traction on the idea that we urgently need to work on security, reliability, stability, etc., and suddenly we're all supposed to be excited about heading full speed the other way.

> I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work

And others see too much value in their work.

Yes, we should punish care and craftsmanship. That's a recipe for success.

Obsolescence is not punishment.

Lol. Im a CEO and Ive re-vamped my hiring process that has nothing to do with writing code.

I test to see the way people think now. People like you would pass my interview.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com