My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.
My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn!
Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.
Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to equate using C as going soft.
Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).
I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.
‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.”
This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.
Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
> Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win.
For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.
These posts are just programmers trying to understand their new place in the hierarchy. I'm in the same place and get it, but also truisms like 'will always win' is basically just throwing a wild guess at what the future will look like. A better attitude is to attempt to catch the wave.
TFA's author is literally saying it may happen. He's using AI so he already caught the wave. He's augmenting himself with AI tools. He's not saying "AI will never surpass humans at writing programs". He writes:
" At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through."
You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why.
We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day.
To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, TODAY*, shortcomings.
TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.
My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn!
Attitude as old as time itself.
You mock, but not very persuasively. You seem to be relying on a silly idea you don't even believe in: that someone, once, made fun of C programming.
>AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking.
Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.
Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.
Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to equate using C as going soft.
Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).
I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.
I have some bad news for you
In chess, engines have long been stronger than humans, but for a long time a (super) grandmaster with an engine was still better than an engine alone.
I'm observing that there is some kind of status quo bias nearly uniformly being surfaced by the programming community right now.
I myself have feelings like this, as a software engineer by trade.
"We will forever be useful!" As a sounding cry against radical transformation. I hope that's the case, but some of these pieces just seem like copium.
‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.”
This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.
Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
> Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win.
For how long? Do I get to feel smug about this for 10 days, 10 weeks, or 10 years? That radically changes the planned trajectory of my life.
These posts are just programmers trying to understand their new place in the hierarchy. I'm in the same place and get it, but also truisms like 'will always win' is basically just throwing a wild guess at what the future will look like. A better attitude is to attempt to catch the wave.
TFA's author is literally saying it may happen. He's using AI so he already caught the wave. He's augmenting himself with AI tools. He's not saying "AI will never surpass humans at writing programs". He writes:
" At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through."
You and GP are both attacking him on a strawman: it's not clear why.
We're seeing countless AI slop and the enshittification and lower uptime for services day after day.
To anyone using these tools seriously on a daily basis it's totally obvious there are, TODAY*, shortcomings.
TFA doesn't talk about tomorrow. It talks about today.
To be fair, the author phrased his point poorly in a way that invites confusion:
> "But for now, real programmers will always win."
"for now ... always", not a good phrasing.