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0 pointsjacquesm1mo ago0 comments

Spot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to 'the programmer problem' have failed.

Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But originally compilers were supposed to kill off the programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's). Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code' because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe it when I see it.

Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with AI).

The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed. But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded solution that is in production at some presumably secure installation.

I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we will be seeing a lot of.

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exmadscientist1mo ago

In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.

Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.

Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.

thewebguyd1mo ago

> Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications

Which is why I think there's very little threat to the various tech career paths from AI.

Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software. It's always been the most difficult and frustrating part of the process, and always will be. And that's just actually articulating the requirements, to say nothing of the process of even agreeing on the requirements in the first place to even start writing the spec.

If a business already cannot clearly define what they need to an internal dev team, with experts that can somewhat translate the messy business logic, then they have a total of zero hope to ever do the same but to an unthinking machine and expect any kind of reliable output.

skydhash1mo ago

> Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software

There’s nearly 10k rfcs and the whole ISO corpus that disagree with you. It’s not that people can’t write requirements. It’s just that they change so much over the lifetime of the business that no one really bothers. Or the actual writings are not properly organized and archived.

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ElevenLathe1mo ago

One of the unexpected benefits of everyone scrambling to show that they used AI to do their job is that the value of specs and design documents are dawning on people who previously scoffed at them as busywork. Previously, if I wanted to spend a day writing a detailed document containing a spec and discussion of tradeoffs and motivations, I'd have to hide it from my management. Now, I'm writing it for the AI so it's fine.

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