News sucks

[Loren Pechtel]

BTW, all programmers now work many times faster and better because of AI.

Shit programmers now produce slightly less shitty code faster. It's still shit though, as it always was.

Average programmers produce code faster, but with bugs that are harder to find than they used to be, so it looks better to their bosses, but actually isn't.

Great programmers are overwhelmed with much harder work than before, looking for those hard to find bugs. They still produce good results, because they are great programmers, but their output now costs far more because of supply and demand.

The vast majority of programmers are in the middle tier. But AI is pushing some of them down to the shit tier, and is making it increasingly hard for those with potential to move up to greatness.

Everything looks really cool. As long as you aren't good enough to spot the flaws, (which most programmers and all non-technical bosses aren't).

Good programmers generally understand that they'll spend more time verifying the AI code than they would just doing it themselves.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course, if AI ever lives up its hype and does great programming, human programmers won’t be needed at all. So all those people who studied programming because they were told that programming is the job of the future will be SOL.

There's always something new that will make programmers obsolete. It never pans out because it never touches the fundamental job: translating loose requirements into bulletproof approaches. All that really happens is it takes over more of the scutwork.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

BTW, all programmers now work many times faster and better because of AI. Its super cool.

This is a use case for AI that actually does hold water. You know why? Because programming uses very formal language with strict syntax rules. AI programming is largely a translation exercise, and it's a translation into a language that does not have innuendo, euphemism, or idioms of any sort.

No. Programming is fundamentally a translation exercise between sloppy requirements and logical code.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

BTW, all programmers now work many times faster and better because of AI. Its super cool.

This is a use case for AI that actually does hold water. You know why? Because programming uses very formal language with strict syntax rules. AI programming is largely a translation exercise, and it's a translation into a language that does not have innuendo, euphemism, or idioms of any sort.

I am not so sure. DEADBEEF and 8BADF00D look a lot like idiom to me. And error code ID10T is both euphemism and innuendo, albeit mild forms of both.

An AI that cannot parse 0xDEADBEEF as anything other than the hexadecimal value of the decimal 3,735,928,559 isn't as effective as a human at working with human designed systems - and all systems are fundamentally human designed.

In years past I would have loved a deadbeef allocator, but haven't used a language that would permit use of an uninitialized value in years.

 

[bigfield]

Writing code is not the hard part of programming.