Comment by darthcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darthcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new programming language is just in your native tongue.

I’m not a full time dev, but I code quite a bit doing Systems and OPs stuff, but AI has opened up an entirely new world to me and it has expanded my ability to think through a problem. It’s the ultimate rubber ducky. I love to watch the reasoning process while I’m in opencode so I can interrupt if I see it going down a path that doesn’t make sense.

It’s opened another world to me that allows me to implement ideas I’ve had for years without the time to invest in the skills needed to even try the idea.

I think it’s just how you use the tool.

I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :)

My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age is over, our skills aren’t useless, they can still be applied to making things with modern tools, but it is no longer on our terms, no longer programming, no longer the meditative thinking process it once was.

For non-programmers, this is their golden age, the reign of programmer tyranny is over.

I'd argue that this is the golden age for consultants.

The old equation was several expensive programmers per project. The new equation is a clown with a token budget plus an expensive rescue operation. In either case, the project will still be late, and it'll cost roughly the same.

What were programmers' terms?

The code

I sympathize with this take but I think it’s conflating programming as a hobby vs code needed to run a business.

I always believed that programming was solving problems and building things. With AI, you can still solve problems - the better your questions/ prompts the faster you get to your answer. To ask those questions you need to probably have that meditative thinking to grasp the crux of what you’re trying to solve.

On the business side, paying a programmer for their meditative time would be the first line item to cut, when you can bark orders at an idiot savant instead.

When a business pays me to develop software, that's a lot more than coding. Sometimes it takes weeks to just translate the business needs into a plan, budget, and timeline (not that I ever meet it). Often that includes documentation, training, infra, and a maintenance contract (hopefully with retainer).

The coding really is such a small part of that process.

Absolutely. And honestly, I don't think AI can really replace that. It can execute a plan, but it can't really figure out the best plan from a sea of unknowns strewn within people's minds. There's a certain meditative aspect to this stream of work still, but I would hesitate to call it "programming".

> I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming.

Exactly, it is a skill, and it is different from programming, but in the age of cars why train to outrun them on foot? train to drive the car.

Using AI for hours and hours every day has got to leave a new skill set in the human users. It's hard to sit there and steer every minute, just the volume of verbiage and speed of change is amazing. That time and effort spent into AI steering is your new training.

> I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill,

But it doesn't require some skills. People have posted showing their 7 year old turning out some game using AI; if your software requires the literacy of the average 7 year old to produce some target, trust me - it doesn't require skills.

It requires a different but somewhat overlapping set of skills, and the barrier to entry is much lower. It's neat that 7 year olds can make games, but they're probably not publishing polished and marketable products.

barrier to entry what? to entry having some (seemingly) working code has lowered. But barrier to enter software marketplace with that has not -- that may have been only increased due to the supply pressure. Having working code was always the easier part, but knowing what to write, and what to do with that later is not solved by whatever coding improvements.

That's exactly what I mean.

The age of "programmer tyranny", as you call it, was over long ago. Product manager tyranny has been the de facto regime in Big Tech for years. That's how we ended up with subscription models everywhere, enshittification, and infinite data tracking. Imagine that x1000. That's where we're heading, IMO.

It became much easier to make open source too.

The current biggest problem is reputation and QA. Ie I see hundreds of same kind of apps when I search for open source stuff on F-Droid, but I can't really say whether it was properly audited with current influx of vibe-coded stuff, whether it contains malware, is it fully vibe-coded or human evaluated the result, etc. which one of those hundreds is actually good?

When we solve the slop recognition problem, we can actually see a positive turn from enshittification, because copying products overnight without spyware became almost trivial.

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"?

"but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code.

Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack

When I read stuff like this people I feel like people haven't yet accepted reality. I think knowing how to write code made a lot of people feel very special. Like the could do something magical, and now feel like that's being taken a way from them. I've been writing code since I was a child and spent my entire career as a software engineer, so I understand where these people are coming from, but the reality is AI has changed this profession and this skill set forever. People need to deal with this and move. You can still do very special things with AI that a "normal" person cannot do, so focus your energy there.

What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living

I never said it was easy but it's clear that you're not coping well with new world order. Unfortunately for a lot people, it's here to stay do get used to it.

I agree with you but for a different reason. When the ai generates exactly what I asked it to but it isn't working, I need to think and figure out what I really want rather than what I previously thought I wanted.

> I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code

I don't think this is true any more; you need to ask the agent to inspect the system, draw up plans with the system's current shape in mind, then after it's done writing the code, ask for it to review the code, and make sure it's as minimal and high quality as possible a couple of times.

Creating programs really doesn't need deep understanding of the fundamentals any more. It needs a shallow understanding, and a willingness to manually test a lot.

And I'm personally not happy with that. To manually test something, we have QA, to shape business requirements, we have a business analyst and a product owner. Now a developer needs to be a 3-in-1 person?

No, the AI takes care of everything but the final manual testing, mostly. It's improving on all aspects over time, too.

It's not that much work.

For software within a certain complexity scope, this is true. Like the average SaaS CRUD experience that many web developers were building before AI - a lot of that can be handled almost entirely by agents, with very little human in the loop activity. But past a certain point of scale/complexity, this breaks down rapidly. In the past 8 months I've seen this occur several times, and if you only rely on agents to get you to that point, then you're in a heap of trouble when you do reach it, because it's very hard to backtrack.

AI has mostly been improving faster than the complexity of the projects people are capable of handling has increased. The lines are going to cross soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com