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Comment by beernet | Hacker News Reader

Coding is not dead. No one stops you guys and nobody intends to.

I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

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I heard him say that too. And he's probably right. But it's more like every knitter now has access to an automated loom.

Oddly I feel AI is getting me off the endless learn new tech churn. I was looking at a few odd ball programming books on my shelf, graphics programming from scratch and retro game dev (c64 edition and nes editions) and thinking I might now have time to work through these instead of learning technology x.

https://www.retrogamedev.com/

https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/

And I'll be manually coding as I want to learn!

> off the endless learn new tech churn.

you make a good point. I lost interest around "MCP" in all this; now we're up to people not understanding map reduce and manually garbage collecting for the AI.

I have the Minix book, somewhere...

knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

> In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

Equally true for today's AI coding agents

Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc.

In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.

I was never talking about a knitting machine in the first place. Rather, I was referring to the old lady sitting on her sofa, knitting a sock she could also buy for a dollar, but decides to do it herself for the love of the game and nostalgia: a hobby.

The "art" of programming is going exactly that route, maybe with a little fewer ladies and more men.

I didn’t hear the exact analogy so I made some assumption. But I fail to see any insightful analogy which could make such predictions, unless the analogy is operating on top of some flawed assumptions about industrial knitware production.

An old lady could equally sit in front of her desktop PC write some HTML, and upload a blog page with her amazing knitting projects, or she could get pintrest. This was true before LLMs, and it is still true today.

Another potential flaw is the assumption that professional knitwear design does not exist. It does. Plenty of people work in industrial scale knitwear products. We have people designing new products, making patterns and recipes, we have manual labor in the production, operating machines or even knitting by hand. Case in point, travel anywhere and go to a local market popular with tourists, and you will see plenty of mass produced knitted products, most of them took great skill to design and produce. Nothing compatible to prompting an LLM to do this for you.

Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.

The OpenClaw inventor? Ok, sure. I think this is sort of cute. The idea that it is just great that all knowledge work would just be a "hobby" when that logically a world in which there would be no leisure would be quite amusing if it is wasn't so depressing.

> Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

How is that a good thing? Sounds insanely dystopian to me. Especially considering all the other jobs that will be affected too.

It sucks to fear for your job because programmers decided to automate your job away, doesn't it?

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-co...

yeah, it does suck, all the way to nvidia's bank account

those are extremists. for them it must be left or right. two cannot coexist.

meanwhile in reality many jobs still exist that could be automated..Why? because people dont let others automate their joy of life away.

its how it always goes.

people will be programming professionally, and such programs will be used by businesses.

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