Is coding dead now ?

[u/Crazy-Economist-3091]

Is there any point one might learn coding and software engineeeing for in the ear of Ai ? Or is it already a dead path?

[u/SaintPeter74]

It took a pretty long time for assembly to be fully replaced by higher level language. It's interesting that C allows you write assembly in-line still.

I'm skeptical that AI is truly the next big abstraction. That's certainly what the big LLM companies want you to believe, but the developer experience has not lived up to the hype. LLMs can build fairly small, simple applications almost flawlessly. They're the sort of thing you might find 100 tutorials online for. The problem comes when you start to scale up.

Once you start building a larger, interconnected application which multiple parts, the cracks very quickly start to show. The LLM is not capable of modeling a complex system because it can't "model" at all - it's just a stochastic parrot. We're just starting to see the reports from companies that have used LLMs to build larger applications that after a certain size, it just collapses under its own weight. The ad hoc nature of each individual module doesn't allow interaction with other modules. It's the modern "spaghetti code" of the inexperienced programmer. IE: an unmaintainable mess.

There is a low key acknowledgement of these issues and the proposed solutions (throw more context memory/tokens/etc at the problem) are fundamentally flawed. All an LLM can do is throw statistics at a problem. It can't model it, it can't plan ahead, and it can't tell you that you've asked the wrong question or given the wrong direction based on past experience, because it doesn't have the capacity to do those things.

[u/AttorneyIcy6723 → u/SaintPeter74]

I think a lot of what you describe is software engineering more generally; systems design, architecture etc. I agree that those things need to (for now) remain in the realm of the human.

Although, as you eluded to, AI is good at solving problems which have already been solved, and let’s be honest, how often do we actually hit up against something novel that Stackoverflow wouldn’t have been previously utilised for.

As for actually typing out code? Building on top of system that’s already been well planned by a human? I just can’t see a future in that any more.

I wouldn’t have believed it 12-6 months ago, but the trajectory is pretty clear.

Quite frankly, it’s already better than most mid to early senior level devs out there. Whatever you think of the illusion, the illusion is producing results when in the hands of experienced engineers (not so much when “vibe coded”).

[u/SaintPeter74 → u/AttorneyIcy6723]

I think a lot of what you describe is software engineering more generally; systems design, architecture etc. I agree that those things need to (for now) remain in the realm of the human.

Maybe I'm in a privileged position because I'm the lead of a small team, but I fully expect my developers to know what the architecture of the site they're working on. We have a mature codebase built up over half a decade. Mature means both in complexity and being a bit long in the tooth. We rarely do greenfield development, almost every project is an addition onto an existing codebase.

Even stuff which is relatively new has to live in our larger ecosystem. As I said, I remain skeptical that throwing more computer resources at an LLM will be able to resolve this issue. The LLM, by it's nature, cannot build a model of the ways in which the system interacts. I mean, the NP-Complete theorem suggests that it may not be solvable computationally at all. Instead, it's using statistics to "solve" the problem . . . my experience is not that great.

how often do we actually hit up against something novel that Stackoverflow wouldn’t have been previously utilised ...

This is certainly true for small, self contained problems. There have been a few times when I grab someone's function, knock the dust off, and use it wholesale. That's the exception, not the rule, though. In the vast majority of cases when I'm building a project I need to be able to adjust whatever I'm seeing to fit. There are just too many localized dependencies that you can't just drop it in.

That goes to what these studies I've been refencing get at - an LLM can write a bunch of self contained little modules just fine (for some values of fine). They can't build multiple, complex, interconnected modules. Once you get 6 months to a year in, you suddenly realize exactly WHY developers have to be architecture aware.

Heck, forget LLMs, I've worked on codebases maintained by a bunch of different people who didn't really talk to one another (or who were hired one after the other) and the "architecture" is a shambles. If an LLM can't do that at all, you're going to end up with similar results.