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- Hacker News
- The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt.
Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent.
Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone.
I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine started an online psychology counseling site. A year ago they would hire a developer. Now, he only needed an LLM. And it’s the whole thing: a booking system, video calls, a website. What’s underneath: he doesn’t know. The only thing that matters to him is that it works.
That to me looks like the end of programming.
by bgarbiak - > Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent.
So, you'll rely on the tech that created buggy code to somehow suddenly create bug-free code?
by chrisjj - Can he trust it's secure? Does what about when something goes wrong. Ops issues might come into play and just handing AI agent ssh keys could cause all sorts of issues. Only time will tell though I guess.by kodoman
- > but I remember a time when we decided when a given technology began and when did it end
…when was that?
by colado - >It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the invention of the printing press wasn't "the end of drawing by hand".
The printing press let you scale copies of something already drawn. That is nothing like what AI is doing here which is making drawing easier. It's more like people now draw by hand using pens and pencils instead of scraping small rocks against bigger rocks. Technically you can still scrape rocks together, but everyone opts for the modern convenience of better tools.
>It's not the end of programming, in the same way as the birth of big tech wasn't the beginning of programming.
Considering big tech brought programming to the masses arguable big tech did begin programming as a thing people do.
by charcircuit - Fair, but won't big tech collapse without the actual people force?by appseecker
- I suppose the author is pointing at the fact that coding != programming. The term "programming" is wider applicable than just in relation with computers.
Though I don't quite agree with the analogy. To me it seems more like the difference between writing with pen & paper or typing, digital vs analog drawing or printing press vs photo copier. There are some significant changes in how to use the tool properly (can't backspace/undo on physical). However the essence of writing a good story is not in the typing/penning it transcends that. At the same time it is true that different individuals may produce better output with one or the other due to personal preferences or adapting a different creative process.
by trashb - The fact that we had "The End of Programming" then "No one wants artisanal code anymore" and now "It's not the end of programming"
Getting a really really artificial vibe about the content being pushed to this website :/
Making me feel less motivated to even come here to be honest
by Madmallard - We've seen this cycle before with high-level languages or IDEs, where the bar for entry drops but the underlying complexity of building reliable systems remains the same.
- AI is not an abstraction.by archagon
- Well I can't wait until I don't have to hand code at work anymore. I also can't wait until I do something else for work.by _def
- What would you be interested doing?by dgellow
- You don’t have to wait! Quit and go do something else!
- Become a manager? retire?
I write code in my work, and enjoy it. I also write less directly because of llm's but get to read more (which I luckily also enjoy, as long as I understand what is going on). I think you made more of a snide comment and deep down you actually enjoy it ;-). I mean, who doesn't like to code. It's awesome. If not, i hope you find something fulfilling sooner rather than later.
- I think that coding by hand is largely not going to occur anymore. What that does to the learning of new developers + the stagnation of old developers? I do not know.
I believe that what makes a good developer (a great developer, really) is the ability to do something at the smallest level "perfectly" or close to it. Chaining those tiny building blocks together. Understanding the entire flow of data + logically. Making something as fast as it can be. When you put more and more of those tiny blocks together, things get a little more imperfect - but a fantastic developer can keep them all perfect for a long time.
We're jumping way above that level. That small, perfect logic process, that visibility is now completely hidden from us, some of us wouldn't even know how to do it anymore. And juniors of today will never learn to.
And maybe they don't need to. Perhaps we will just build "bigger" software so that the level of imperfection becomes less noticeable. Larger systems, more functionality, more security.
I think the brain atrophy is going to hit us HARD though. It feels too fast to rip away the one thing that taught us all of this. Building something piece by piece was the way most of us learned. Then you can jump into bigger and bigger projects and your brain creates those pathways. Previous generations had months / years to learn new tooling - and now we threw ALL of the tooling away and said "use this instead". I think good developers will always find a way to learn and grow, but man is it going to take some time, we completely shifted the way the entire industry produces the machine in the matter of 12 months.
I still believe that code is the best way to represent a sufficiently complex specification, natural human language feels very ambiguous sometimes, like extra lossy compression (whatever that is worth).
- It's really interesting to the vagueness of natural language and the fact that it's actually impossible to express a single concrete meaning in natural language. That is to say their is always a set of possible interpretations one can never simple refer to one single thing and a program in a programming language is always only one thing (I know that you could argue that compiling to different machine code means their is vagueness since it might produce a x86-64 binary or a powerpc binary and the issue of UB but you see my point).
I do think that if one simply 'vibe codes' something they can never really understand the program even if they prompted it unless they study the source in detail. In natural language you can only ever point to a set of things that containing a subset of thing(s) you want.
by kodoman - If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.by sdevonoes
- >Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.
nope. but, vibe coded slop is all we're actually seeing.
by pydry - > Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.
I was reading a biography of Tovalds and one of the core things that mark the birth of Linux was the drive to learn. Same when reading “Coders at Work”, the will to learn and make things happen is a common recurrence.
I’ve never seen LLM coding that is not “I can’t bother to learn about this”. It’s always about magicking answers out of thin air, not about motivation to explore some fields.
by skydhash - One thing I keep discovering about the agentic era of programming is that all of the old lessons and bits of wisdom about programming are still valid. They're just 10 to 100x more important now that you can generate 10,000 lines in an hour.
e.g. Break your code up into loosely coupled modules, don't have leaky abstractions, don't have huge God files, have good black box end-to-end testing, do the design work before the implementation, do lots of automated testing, have good documentation, etc.
Here is another one that was always true, end users only care about the observable behavior of your program. Does it solve the problem in a performant way? Is it reliable?
And another one, it was common when you inherited a large code base that was mature and written before you to not have any clue how most of it worked.
We have to accept that the art of nudging the text around is just not part of producing code for money anymore.
- > it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm
In theory no, but for a successful execution you must have people that understand what's going on, otherwise the competitor that understands will eat you.
> who cares how was it written.
In the pre AI era a lot of sw was written by interns, juniors, some bigcon consultants, some offshore indian or east-european dudes, it didn't even matter before.
by vb-8448 - Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same.
This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill.
A world filled with mountains of terrible code is a world that will reward the very programers who are trying to fight that future today.
- What value does the broccoli haired nephew provide in that scenario?by exitb
- Yeah right, like I want to take over the shit broccoli haired nephews created... Even for 3x paycheck.. The one who takes it is a looser, being exploited for pennies to fix all the shit. And I bet at the end, you will be fired anyway, because you are not of their kind..
Winners are managers (who hired nephews) and nephews themselfs, they did barely any usefull job and got paid a lot. They should do usefull job instead, like drivers, warehouse jobs, services, farming and other less paid but very importand and usefull jobs.
by Borg3 - > This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program
Which is funny because that was the case 25+ years ago. We (the nephews) would create websites using PHP. It was common for 15, 16 years old teenagers to know more about tech than the adults. That's not the case anymore. So this time it might be different.
by owebmaster - People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?
Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a by product of a car, a tv, or your fridge. No ordinary folk ever said “I’m going to go a buy WinZip now”. They simply had a variant of WinZip available with whatever computer they bought. There is simply no category of people who are willing to pay for “high quality hand crafted software”, except for perhaps a few ideologically motivated people.
Software development “lost” because it was seen as “something that comes for free with a computer”, and not something that people have to actively buy, like they buy TVs, fridges, or paintings.
by fnoef - >When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?
comparing scribes to writers and artists and software developers is insane
- I do not think programming is dead, but because I don't think LLMs can really do the job unassisted. I agree with you that the printing press is a dumb argument, basically tantamount to saying programming is dead except for bespoke artisanal programs to buy at ren faires and hacker conferences.
It accepts the inevitability premise so completely that I wonder if the author is secretly an AI booster trying to make the other side look bad.
by jackb4040 - > When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture
So programming "ended" if it's no longer such a dominant profession, even if plenty of people still do it as an art/craft/hobby and some of them even get paid to do so?
Doesn't sound like the "end of programming" to me, more a reduction in the number of programming jobs. One that if anything is overdue - many developers today get paid to do jobs that shouldn't need to exist even without AI.
by barnabee - The printing press killed the work of scribes, people who copied books page by page. It was a form of art and craftsmanship. It didn't disappear completely, but 99% of production moved to the printing press.
Programming will follow the same path. Typing code by hand will be relegated to 1%, while 99% will be generated by assistants and agents.
by meerita