Writing robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code has never been easy and still isn’t. It’s an extremely difficult skill.
Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.
The truth is we’re just realizing nobody, even the SWE’s, care about the code much as long as an LLM can grind it out for free.
There’s going to be a lot more of this coping as more and more human thinking gets automated. I can hear it now: “gathering business requirements was always the easy part”.
> Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.
I also add that the skills required to write robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code are also the same skills required to make LLMs generate code with those traits. Mediocre developers struggle to write mediocre code, but can easily prompt a LLM to output mediocre code. The output is always mediocre, both in the short run and moreso in the long run.
Easy can still be time consuming. I think trying to get an LLM to spit out the whole program is a flawed approach, but I understand why you'd want to be able to spitball 12 different data models quickly.
Man, these "hot takes" on the impact of AI are all becoming so tiring. I'm especially sick of all these "code was always the easy part" missives I see everywhere now, mostly because I think they're flat out wrong.
As another comment said, "easy can still be time consuming". I've seen plenty of projects that were well defined take months in implementation time (and then still sometimes fail for technical reasons). But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years? Because business people knew the difference between a successful tech company and an also-ran usually was, in huge part, due to the quality of their software engineers. If "code was the easy part", then you go write Google Maps in 2005, or Netflix streaming in 2007, or self driving cars in 2010, or, heck, ChatGPT in 2022.
Sure, good code for a bad product still fails, but this revisionist history trying to pretend coding was so easy, so LLM-assisted coding tools won't have a big impact, is nauseating.
> But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years?
The vast majority of developers are not paid to write code. They are paid to produce, deploy, and run bug-free and efficient software systems. That does not necessarily require you to type anything at a keyboard.
Ask yourself this: how come the more you progress in seniority the less code you write?
Repeating this banality does not make it true. There were tons of tech companies over the past 30 years or so who, despite solving the same problems, lost out to competitors because they had worse programmers.
I actually agree that the code is one of the most important things to get right at a software company. Still. I would argue very few companies win on code merit alone either though. Strategy, customer communication, market timing, etc on the business side; design, system architecture, dev velocity on the technical side. So many factors are important beyond the quality of the code.
Oh man, I was composing my own opinion, and I can see that Hacker News is brimming with opinions. But that’s perfectly fine, I believe. All the diverse perspectives that we engage in this intellectual sparring match is a positive thing, isn’t it? :)
Writing robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code has never been easy and still isn’t. It’s an extremely difficult skill.
Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.
The truth is we’re just realizing nobody, even the SWE’s, care about the code much as long as an LLM can grind it out for free.
There’s going to be a lot more of this coping as more and more human thinking gets automated. I can hear it now: “gathering business requirements was always the easy part”.
> Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.
I also add that the skills required to write robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code are also the same skills required to make LLMs generate code with those traits. Mediocre developers struggle to write mediocre code, but can easily prompt a LLM to output mediocre code. The output is always mediocre, both in the short run and moreso in the long run.
Easy can still be time consuming. I think trying to get an LLM to spit out the whole program is a flawed approach, but I understand why you'd want to be able to spitball 12 different data models quickly.
https://notes.mtb.xyz/p/your-data-model-is-your-destiny
Man, these "hot takes" on the impact of AI are all becoming so tiring. I'm especially sick of all these "code was always the easy part" missives I see everywhere now, mostly because I think they're flat out wrong.
As another comment said, "easy can still be time consuming". I've seen plenty of projects that were well defined take months in implementation time (and then still sometimes fail for technical reasons). But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years? Because business people knew the difference between a successful tech company and an also-ran usually was, in huge part, due to the quality of their software engineers. If "code was the easy part", then you go write Google Maps in 2005, or Netflix streaming in 2007, or self driving cars in 2010, or, heck, ChatGPT in 2022.
Sure, good code for a bad product still fails, but this revisionist history trying to pretend coding was so easy, so LLM-assisted coding tools won't have a big impact, is nauseating.
> But most importantly, if "code were the easy part", why were top programmers receiving kingly wages for over 20 years?
The vast majority of developers are not paid to write code. They are paid to produce, deploy, and run bug-free and efficient software systems. That does not necessarily require you to type anything at a keyboard.
Ask yourself this: how come the more you progress in seniority the less code you write?
But the code is the easy part. Solving the right problem is the hard part.
Repeating this banality does not make it true. There were tons of tech companies over the past 30 years or so who, despite solving the same problems, lost out to competitors because they had worse programmers.
I actually agree that the code is one of the most important things to get right at a software company. Still. I would argue very few companies win on code merit alone either though. Strategy, customer communication, market timing, etc on the business side; design, system architecture, dev velocity on the technical side. So many factors are important beyond the quality of the code.
Oh man, I was composing my own opinion, and I can see that Hacker News is brimming with opinions. But that’s perfectly fine, I believe. All the diverse perspectives that we engage in this intellectual sparring match is a positive thing, isn’t it? :)