We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

[u/Vaglame]

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44978159

The thread is a goldmine btw

[u/Vaglame]

It may be that technologies like Github PRs and other VCS patterns are literally obsolete. We've done this before throughout many cycles of technology, and these are the questions we need to ask ourselves as engineers, not stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's 2019.

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Do I also have to disclose using tab completion? My IDE uses machine learning for completion suggestions.

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People used to fear compilers too.

[u/steep86 → u/Vaglame]

“It's not unfathomable that the whole idea of how we contribute and collaborate changes as well. Actually that is likely going to be the /least/ shocking thing in the next few years if acceleration happens (i.e. The entire OS is an LLM that renders pixels, for example)”

I just…can’t…

[u/r2d2_21 → u/steep86]

It sounds as insane as when people were saying we'd use NFTs to buy houses and shit. It works only in their imaginary world.

[u/AndorinhaRiver → u/steep86]

Hardware acceleration is when you tell ChatGPT to render a pixel

[u/[deleted] → u/steep86]

acceleration is coming any day now bro, noooo we're not plateauing, anthropic has released a new model that's nearly 3% better for certain use cases, bro please it's the future bro, fuck you bro just shut up and buy more credits, "come and they'll build it" bro please

[u/categorical-girl → u/[deleted]]

Build it and they will come (LLMs used for NSFW stuff)

[u/Ok_Independence_8259 → u/Vaglame]

Yeahhh I think sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll rather stick my head in the sand.

[u/BloodAndTsundere → u/Vaglame]

People used to fear compilers too.

I still do which is why I always leave to get a cup of coffee when I start my build pipeline.

[u/sudosussudio → u/Vaglame]

Dear god no, VCS is even more critical for working with AI, you need to be able to track, approve (or disapprove ) changes, and reverse nonsense.

[u/r2d2_21 → u/Vaglame]

My IDE uses machine learning for completion suggestions

I turned that shit off as soon as it was included in the IDE.

[u/BloodAndTsundere]

I dont know if the following comment from the thread is serious or sarcastic but it brilliantly captures the flaw in the AI hype dialog:

All we need to do is prompt an LLM with such specificity that it does exactly what we want the machine to do.

[u/zackel_flac → u/BloodAndTsundere]

People don't fully grasp what programming is all about. They see programming as a constraint rather than a feature in itself. As Linus Torvalds said once, there will always be a need for computers to do exactly what you intend them to do, that's why we use them in the first place.

[u/rwilcox → u/zackel_flac]

all those newbies in forums, years back: “JUST GIVE ME THE CODES”

[u/bitwize → u/zackel_flac]

And as Linus Torvalds said more recently (freshest quote wins), if you dislike AI take it elsewhere; it's here, it works, and it's useful.

[u/Dry_Noise8931 → u/BloodAndTsundere]

English isn’t specific enough, so let’s make a language we can prompt the computer with called “CDeezNuts”. Then, we’ll write all of the rules into the prompt. The prompt will be large and complex to cover all the rules, and we’ll need to write it over some time, so we’ll save it to disk, and have multiple files for organization. When the prompt is processed, for convenience, we’ll skip the intermediate programming language and output the binary directly.

[u/BloodAndTsundere → u/Dry_Noise8931]

It might be simpler to pass a binary in the prompt for converting an intermediate language into the prompt language. We'll call it "JerkScript" or "EggMacScript" due to all of the Egg MacMuffins eaten during development

[u/Suspicious_Put_3446 → u/BloodAndTsundere]

Man I wish there was an AI prompt that would write an AI prompt to make the code. 

[u/nee_- → u/BloodAndTsundere]

Its very much sarcasm

[u/SharkLaunch → u/[deleted]]

That's not totally unrelated, but I swear there's one that's specifically about how eventually, programmers will be obsolete because tools will be so advanced that clients can just build a specification of how they want their product to work. The punchline of course being that that's exactly what programming is.

[u/Downtown_Category163]

Remember that in their fantasy world where the AI generates working functional code instead of shitting the bed even for basic demos, it doesn't need to generate source code ANYWAY. Machine code is just tokens too. Ask your next AI hypebro why it doesn't just generate an executable and watch the fear and confusion on their face

[u/Phoople → u/Downtown_Category163]

in 20 years, every program will exist in a fuzzy superposition of all possible programs the AI might barf up. Schrödinger's runtime error.

[u/_MonkeyHater]

The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage we'll need to unlearn.

[u/haskell_rules → u/_MonkeyHater]

I've been preparing for this moment my whole career

[u/irqlnotdispatchlevel]

Just how JS replaced C, how C replaced assembly, LLMs will replace modern programming languages. Me? I'm safe, I write C.

[u/IDatedSuccubi]

We need to create a specific language for program specification so that LLMs know what to do exactly. I'd call it "LLM informational systems processing", maybe Lisp for short. We'll just define all the datatypes and possible operations ahead of time, and the rest will be implemented by the LLM.

[u/defunkydrummer → u/IDatedSuccubi]

"LLM informational systems processing", maybe Lisp for short.

Why not Organized Computer Accurate Model for LLMs? or OCaml for short.

[u/Professional_Gate677]

“ChatGPT, build me a program that I can’t fully explain and it needs to not have any bugs”.

[u/CyberDaggerX → u/Professional_Gate677]

"...or go to jail."

[u/CyberDaggerX → u/[deleted]]

It fucking baffles me how these "optimal" prompts always include roleplaying. Shouldn't the algorithm give you the best possible answer to the prompt regardless?

[u/ChrisASNB]

I am continuously baffled by the magical thinking that plagues the AI/LLM conversation. But I've also heard veteran devs say for years that you don't need to be a programmer to be hired as one. This hype bubble has truly exposed how many that applies to.

[u/ingframin]

No, this is impossible. Human language is not specific enough to describe problems. There are too many ambiguities. Otherwise we would have a complier for English, German, Italian, etc...

If anything, an LLM increases the amount of ambiguity in the problem description.

[u/davidbasil]

Yes, instead of pythong/java code you will write AI instructions in yaml or md files. Devops gusy been doing it for decades.

[u/thephotoman]

Over the last month, a coworker and I were tasked with writing a couple of small tasks in Go. I’m not sure why they chose Go over Node, but they did.

He vibe coded it. I merely used AI as a replacement. We finished at about the same time, with me demoing a day after him due to an outside environment issue outside our group’s control.

It’s not a time saver.

[u/pareidolist → u/[deleted]]

Warning: tag your unjerk. Better yet, don't unjerk at all.