[bananaflag]

Yeah but this time it's for real.

All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace.

AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous and not cover all the bases. And people are familiar with natural language. And it can fill in the missing details and disambiguate the others.

This has been known to be possible for decades, as (simplifying a bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the engineer in natural, ambiguous language what to do and they will do it. Now the AI takes the place of the engineer.

Also, I personally never believed before AI that programming will disappear, so the argument that "this has been hyped before" doesn't touch my soul.

I have no idea why this is so hard to understand. I'd like people to reply to me in addition to downvoting.

[danhau]

Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail.

How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful when paired with a programmer.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities.

This is not the case:

- Before the 90s, programming was rather a job for people who were insanely passionate about technology, and working as a programmer was not that well-regarded (so no "growing opportunities").

- After the burst of the first dotcom bubble, a lot of programmers were unemployed.

- Every older programmer can tell you how fast the skills that they have can become and became irrelevant.

Over the last decade, the stability and opportunities for programmers was more like a series of boom-bust cycles.

[cafebabbe]

AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer.

Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice.

I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.

[Tanjreeve]

For a brief blip in time the last few years it was possible to jump from a code camp to a decent paying job and vaguely disappear for a while like Milton from office space. The current period from a bad economy is more of a reversion to the mean.

[t_mahmood]

A manager is not going to handle all the nitty gritty details, that an engineer knows, fine say, they can ask a LLM to make a web portal.

Does he know about SQL injection? XSS?

Maybe he knows slightly about security stuffs and asks the LLM to make a secure site with all the protection needed. But how the manager knows it works at all? If you figure out there's a issue with your critical part of the software, after your users data are stolen, how bad the fallback is going to be?

How good a tool is also depends on who's using it. Managers are not engineers obviously unless he was an engineer before becoming a manager, but you are saying engineers are not needed. So, where's the engineer manager is going to come from? I'm sure we're not growing them in some engineering trees

[edgyquant]

There are already companies that exist to audit the security of codebases programmatically so this will just be part of the flow

[skydhash]

It's like saying "I want a bridge" and then expect steel beams and cables to appear (or planks and ropes) and that's all you need. The user needs are usually clear enough (they need a way to cross that body of water or that chasm), but the how is the real catch.

In the real world, the materials are visible so people have a partial understanding on how it gets done. But most of the software world is invisible and has no material constraints other than the hardware (you can't use RAM that is not there). If the hardware is like a blank canvas, a standard web framework is like a draw by the numbers book (but one with lines drawn by a pencil so you can erase it easily). Asking the user to code with LLM is like asking a blind to draw the Mona Lisa with a brick.

[ajshahH]

> And it can fill in the missing details and disambiguate the others.

Are you suggesting “And Claude, make no mistakes” works?

Because otherwise you need an expert operating the thing. Yes, it can answer questions, but you need to know what exactly to ask.

> This has been known to be possible for decades, as (simplifying a bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the engineer in natural, ambiguous language what to do and they will do it

I have yet to see vibe coding work like this. Even expert devs with LLMs get incorrect output. Anytime you have to correct your prompt, that’s why your argument fails.

[mexicocitinluez]

I truly believe that people that see entire, non-trivial applications being bult without serious human intervention have not in fact worked on non-trivial applications.

And while these tools can be invaluable in some cases, I still don't know how we get from "Hazy requirements where the user doesn't know what they even want" to "Production-ready apps built at the finger-tips of the PM".

Another really important detail people keep missing is that we have to make thousands of micro-decisions along the way to build up a cohesive experience to the user. LLM's haven't really shown they're great at not building assumptions into code. In fact, they're really bad at it.

Lastly, do people not realize how easy it to so convince an LLM of something that isn't true or vice versa? i love these tools but even I find myself trying to steer it into the direction that makes sense to me, not the direction that makes sense generally.

[mexicocitinluez]

> All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages.

This is just categorically false.

No-code tools didn't fail because they were "mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages". They failed because the people who were supposed to benefit the most (non-developers) neither had the time nor desire to build stuff in the first place.

[quotemstr]

The thing about talking to computers is less the formality and more the specificity. People don't know what they want. To use an LLM effectively, you need to think about what you want with enough clarity to ask for it and check that you're getting it. That LLMs accept your wishes in the form of natural language instead of something with a LALR(1) grammar doesn't magically obviate the need for specificity and clarity in communication.

[bananaflag]

Agree that one needs clarity, but how does that differ from my example with the manager and the engineer? The manager also (ideally) learns in time that, when they are more clear, the engineer does the work better.

[medi8r]

There are a lot of people who can't program but can do specifity. Researchers and lawyers for a start. It does widen the pool and there might be suprising people who never coded who can now build. Maybe people previosuly dismissed as not academic or "blue collar".

Paradoxically this may mean there are more jobs for programmer and programmer-likes alike as new cottage industries are born. AI for dentists is coming.

[rsynnott]

Yes, yes, yes, this time it's different, just like the other 20 times (I reckon one of these shows up about once every four or five years).

[empath75]

I spent the last two weeks at work building a whole system to deploy automated claude code agents in response to events and even before i finished it was already doing useful work and now it is automatically handling jira tickets and making PRs.