In case you yourself do not own a table saw, I should point out that table saws don't rip, cut, or mill stock for you. It's like saying "buying a hammer doesn't make you a carpenter".
A better analogy is, now you have what seems like an increasingly intelligent personal assistant that can do any cognitive work that you ask it to do, to increasingly better result, has retrograde amnesia, no accountability, entirely middle of the road morality, access to the internet... eh this isn't really a good analogy either.
More people have the capability now, but not necessarily the experience or understanding.
Point is, if I give a person a calculator, it doesn't even make them the tiniest bit of a mathematician. Nor if I give them a pencil, either. The tool never, ever makes the tradesperson.
Whatever's happening with LLMs, it's not making people programmers. It's how you use the tool, which validates that.
It’s weird though, LLMs still don’t seem very good at magically enabling most non developers able to make software. I’ve tried with a couple people - mostly for curiosity’s sake. Even when they have pressing needs that software could solve, they’re really resistant to talking to the machine about them. Then they don’t know what to actually ask the ai to do. Regular people don’t seem to know what use cases are. Or what a design mockup is. They don’t know what a website is, or what the limitations are. The llm could help guide them through all of this, but the people I’ve sat down in front of the machine didn’t ask the machine to guide them through the process at all.
Of course, if you only know how to vibe code, that doesn’t make you an engineer. But I’m no longer convinced that LLMs make developers pointless. If anything, so far they seem to make our skills much more valuable. With LLMs, I can get a lot of low quality work done quickly if that’s what the project calls for.
AI doesn't make you an expert. Or even a professional in any field. First, AI is terrible at cogent work, without someone driving it. And even if you do get it to do all the work, then that's not you doing it.
"Hi, I asked a coder friend to write an app, I'm a developer", nope!
(I mean, I guess as soon as you start whacking things together with a hammer, you technically sort of are being a carpenter, but that's not the point.)
I think whacking things together with a hammer is the act of building (however inexpertly) whereas carpenter (and other titles) convey something about expertise, mindset, or the intent to hone skills. The DIYer might or might not qualify as an amateur carpenter/electrician/plumber/whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it's pretty obvious what parent poster was implying. Pedantic nitpicks add nothing to the discussion.
edit: sigh, fucking rate limits are such a dumb mechanic if you want quality long-form discussion. By the time I can reply nobody will be looking at their replies.
anyways LLMs might displace "programmers" in the way that 3D CAD software replaced draftsmen, but software engineering, the actual design and architecture skill, isn't going anywhere. I can use carpentry tools to build a bridge over a creek but I'm not qualified to build a bridge carrying Interstate traffic.
These tool analogies are self-soothing for programmers who see agents is simple tools of their trade. But the point of articles like this is that AI agents are more like spreadsheets --- only more so. They're devices that allow normal people without training or aptitude to do things with computers that only programmers were doing before. They displace programmers.
In that sense, the closest physical analogy to a coding agent is probably a 3D printer. But: a really good 3D printer, into which hundreds of billions of dollars had been invested entirely for the purpose of making the printer work weirdly well even for people who have no interest in the different kidns of filament spools.
I'm more than OK with people writing their own software, indeed the main thing I like about the free software movement is that it makes it much easier for people to do that. It's empowering. I don't have a 3D printer, but I like the idea. I think people should be able to build as much of their own stuff as they want. I have a caveat though, which I'll get to at the end.
As far as my personal motivation, I--and most SWEs I know--don't really want to build the kinds of things people are using LLMs to build: audio players, billing software, whatever. I also don't think most backend apps, frontend apps, web frameworks, whatever should exist, and whether they were written by people or LLMs doesn't really factor in. More to the point, I think it's crazy that SWEs and tech workers generally make 8474x what other people make, and I think we've provided dubious value for that remittance, to say nothing of the investment, so knocking us down a peg would be putting things to rights. But, candidly, while I wouldn't love losing my job because of LLMs, I don't think that's happening writ large and I don't think it will happen to me specifically, at least not directly or any time soon. Maybe it matters to you that I don't make beaucoup bucks, maybe it doesn't. Anyway, do with all that what you will.
Kara Swisher has this great line--dunno if it's originally hers--where some social media person is going on about citizen journalists opening up news and how great it is, and she says that makes about as much sense as citizen surgeons. In the same vein, I don't think a person unaccustomed to designing complex systems should try, just like I don't think someone inexperienced at building a house or a car or a plane should try. I still think this even if we have a one-button mystery machine that play-doh's out an object that seems like it may actually fly a couple of people one town over, and even usually safely does. I think we oughta slap a huge fucking label on the side of that machine that says "we have no idea how this works, and we vouch for it not at all" (I've not yet been goaded into reading the ToS for OpenAI or Anthropic, thank Dark Lord Satan, but I would put $5 down that they assume no liability for anything their models do).
So my caveat, and the point of my post, curtly and regrettably expressed via analogy, is that people should feel free to build whatever they want, but they shouldn't build anything they'll seriously rely on. They won't know enough to verify that whatever they build is fit for purpose (and, sweet Satan give me strength, you can't just ask the LLM to verify it for you). Only experts can do that.
Also for color, I do own a table saw, as well as some others, which I used very (very, holy shit) unsafely to do a terrible finishing carpentry job on my house and some other odd jobs. My warning to all readers is Google how table saws can fuck you up, and do not ever stand behind the wood you are sawing because the blade can literally shoot it into you, or IDK at least shoot it at you really fast.
They actually do all of that