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Comment by sikozu | Hacker News Reader

So he's being paid and is sitting there letting an AI tool do his work for him? Insanity.

We didn’t mind when typesetting was automated. Or when compilers were invented. Why is this different?

Because he's paid to deliver code that works. Letting an AI agent do everything would be fine if it didn't make any mistakes, but that's far from reality.

Compilers and typesetters make mistakes. Fewer as time goes on, but that’s not a categorical difference.

Do typesetters inexplicably change the meaning of the book or document being typeset? Do compilers alter the behavior intended by the programmer, sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious? Did the invention of typesetters lead to investments so massive, that the investors had to herald the end of handwriting (no equivalent analogy for compilers)?

It reminds me of the guy who replaced his static blog deployment scripts with asking chatgpt to generate the html from his text based on a template, and said that he isn't sure that the llm isn't changing his writing but hopes it isn't

On compilers, you know they do! Compilers have bugs and some languages have undefined behavior.

On typesetters and investment: the WYSIWYG word processor is on almost every home and office desk in the world.

So I take we can soon replace coders entirely. Just fire all of them. And let some intern under VP prompt the whole thing?

Resistance to technological change has been a thing since farming was invented. Socrates thought that writing will ruin everyone's memory, and that people who just rely on written word will appear knowledgeable while actually knowing nothing.

The only difference is that this is happening to us.

Do typesetters or compilers write the code for you? Or are you perhaps using a disingenuous analogy?

A compiler writes the ASM code for you, and the typesetter does the layout for you, yes absolutely.

The high level language code is a prompt for the compiler. Consider that there is parsable C code whose behavior is not even defined. There are still bugs in compilers today, where the code produced is not what you intended. And further, modern compilers do lots of work to optimize performance. You usually don’t even look at the resulting code, you just gratefully accept the rewrite for the extra oomph.

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