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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies?

Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming.

Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand.

That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever supposed to evolve, doing the same old things the same old way for 50+ years. It's time for a real paradigm shift, and that's what we're seeing now.

All of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. It just needs to be refactored, reorganized, and repurposed, and that's a robot's job if there ever was one.

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You're probably using an IDE that checks your syntax as you type, highlighting keywords and surfacing compiler warnings and errors in real time. Autocomplete fills out structs for you. You can hover to get the definition of a type or a function prototype, or you can click and dig in to the implementation. You have multiple files open, multiple projects, even.

Not to mention you're probably also using source control, committing code and switching between branches. You have unit tests and CI.

Let's not pretend the C developer experience is what it was 30 years ago, let alone 50.

I disagree that any of those things are even slightly material to the topic. It's like saying my car is fundamentally different from a 1972 model because it has ABS, airbags, and a satnav.

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K&R didn't know about CI/CD, but everything else you mention has either existed for over 30 years or is too trivial to argue about.

Conversely, if you took Claude Code or similar tools back to 1996, they would grab a crucifix and scream for an exorcist.

You said C developers are doing things the "same old way" as always.

I think you're taking for granted the massive productivity boost that happened even before today's era of LLM agents.

If all problems were solved, we should have already found a paradise without anything to want for. Your editing workflow being the similar to another for a 1970s era language does not have any relevance to that question.

If all problems were solved

Now that's extrapolation of the sort that, as you point out elsewhere, no LLM can perform.

At least, not one without serious bugs.

We were almost there, back in the 80s.

A vice president at Symbolics, the Lisp machine company at their peak during the first AI hype cycle, once stated that it was the company's goal to put very large enterprise systems within the reach of small teams to develop, and anything smaller within the reach of a single person.

And had we learned the lessons of Lisp, we could have done it. But we live in the worst timeline where we offset the work saved with ever worse processes and abstractions. Hell, to your point, we've added static edit-compile-run cycles to dynamic, somewhat Lisp-like languages (JavaScript)! And today we cry out "Save us, O machines! Save us from the slop we produced that threatens to make software development a near-impossible, frustrating, expensive process!" And the machines answer our cry by generating more slop.

That's your fault for still writing C in Ed :P

But I do broadly agree that we still write code for a lot of shit that should have been automated long before. I'm not actually sure why it hasn't been automated yet. LLM's can kind of do it, I just wish we had automated it with something deterministic and human.

The fact that LLMs can kind of do it is an indictment of current programming languages and frameworks. We're coding at too low a level of abstraction. Code has too much boilerplate, too little entropy. We need a new generation of much higher level languages which would obviate much of the need for code generation. Of course, the tension there is that high-level abstractions always leak and don't work well when maximum performance and efficiency is required.

While i dont disagree with the larger point here i do disagree that all the code we ever need has been written. There are still soooooo many new things to uncover in that domain.

Like what?

New cryptography algorithms, particularly post-quantum cryptography

New zero-knowledge proofs

Video compression

And so forth.

Those are all instances of reuse of existing techniques in new contexts. And when genuinely-new algorithms do arise from genuinely-new areas of study, it's easy enough to teach LLMs how to apply and deploy them.

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