Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end | Hacker News Reader

Eric Schmidt believes the era of writing code manually is coming to an end

inkl.com

10 pointsgbell1216 comments

The best results I'm seeing with my own work is mixing agent with my reading of the code and advising. I find it super hard to imagine losing the human view right now. Agents produce good code but they too often don't see bigger structures. They duplicate code and logic and then can't find all the copies if it needs updating, they still need a person to say "make a helper" or whatever.

True, but I can't help but notice how far agents' capabilities have grown in just the past six months, so I assume they'll continue to improve to the point where I tend to, unfortunately, agree with Schmidt. I mourn it also — but I suspect 'code' will take a more representational form. So we can describe it to agents, at least in codebases that mix human and AI written code.

Eric Schmidt making headlines for saying

"If you're writing code traditionally, stop. It's over"

But the worst part to me, isn't the part that's making headlines - it's that he thinks we don't have any friends, and that AI will be our friends.

"Because they're social, and they sit there, but they don't have that many friends. So they sit in their office, and they collect 10 Claude friends or 10 Gemini friends."

This individual (Eric Schmidt) is heavily invested in lots of AI companies, which he will selectively disclose.

His entire 'job' is to go on a world tour in parading his own AI investments and for everyone to admit defeat and replace their own confidence with AI.

> "Because they're social, and they sit there, but they don't have that many friends. So they sit in their office, and they collect 10 Claude friends or 10 Gemini friends."

Oh dear. He is normalizing AI psychosis.

Coding is a tool for thinking in general.The fact that claude is accomplishing task X does not imply that you should retire you own thinking.

This is what my employer is pushing as well. Instead of writing code, their vision is to turn developers into AI agent managers. Even if I manage to hold on to my job, whatever creative fulfillment I once got from it will be gone. It's incredibly depressing.

Perhaps the next great opportunity is to be the person that designs the best process for setting up and running Schmidt’s ‘invisible AI coding sweat shop’.

Running such an operation is going to be multi-faceted. You have to have the know-how to bring in the AI coding assistants. You have to have a very tight framework for quickly specifying tests, and staying ahead of the bots. The integration. The build processes. The source code management. Etc.

Maybe one person can really be that super productive bot overseer, but they’re going to need tools and strong processes.

Building all that seems to be a fertile field.

I totally get it. What I don’t get is why these perspectives are limited to writing code and not writing or communicating more generally. Just like coding, Eric Schmidt himself is coming to an end. How can smart people not see, writing code is just a canary in the coal mine, a special case that’s only a difference in degree not kind from other sorts of knowledge work?

Guess AI will read his ads and buy his products?

Sounds like either projection or the start of a crash out. Probably insulted by the booing from the plebs at his speech on stage. [1] The comments are interesting.

"Everyone regretted leaving their tomatoes at home that evening"

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNH43a1EI7s

No reason to care what this guy says.

eric schmidt hasn't written code in several decades, i'm not sure why anyone should give anything he has to say on the topic any amount of weight

I didn't have any friends even before AI.

Do you use your username in IRL? :)

No, IRL I go by "anal_actor", including the underscore lol

I will believe it when the end user is paying the actual cost of inference

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