[bitforger]

Interesting how you still need to have some intuitive sense of what's going on under the hood. (You can't say "make Zelda," you have to ask for an array of symbols and manipulate them.)

In that sense it feels like this is still programming, but at a higher level of abstraction with a weird fuzzy compiler. Now we can go from natural language -> JavaScript -> assembly etc. rather than just the last two.

Mediocre programmers use APIs, while good programmers know what's behind the curtain and can debug them. I suspect this will stay the same, no matter how many layers of abstraction we add.

[ShamelessC]

> Mediocre programmers use APIs, while good programmers know what's behind the curtain and can debug them. I suspect this will stay the same, no matter how many layers of abstraction we add.

The skill of both such categories (API developers and developers who use API's) is defined by the ability to know the _least_ amount of complexity needed for a given set of requirements. You may be appealing to some "deeper" sense of what it means to be a programmer, but in terms of what companies are willing to pay - if you get the same job done in a way that is easier to do in the future, you should be rewarded for that, because it saves your own time and the time of anyone who will need to work on that program in the future.

I think this is (only mildly) lacking in nuance. The ability to use AI for this task is surely limited at the moment - and people who know more about programming are certainly more capable of using these systems. As we go forward though, it's important to be able to admit that if an AI can produce a solution faster (and you have easy access to said AI, not a given), then you may be wasting time trying to "roll your own" in pursuit of being a good programmer.

On the other hand, until this AI-assisted experience is democratized, you're correct that it is a good idea to have engineers around who know this stuff from first principles. For now, I'm not terribly concerned that those folks will go away.

[andybak]

> Mediocre programmers use APIs, while good programmers know what's behind the curtain and can debug them.

Personally I'd like to not know what's behind the curtain until I have to. Which category does that put me in?

[Filligree]

Probably in the second category, if you’re able to look behind the curtains on demand. A lot of programmers can’t.

[michaelbrave]

Programming will never go away but those ease of use abstracted layers could bring in a new crowd so to speak. Much like how graphic design became much more common place and somewhat easier to learn once photoshop became common, experts still exist but you also get people in a garage making T-shirts now when before it wasn't much of a thing if that makes sense. An easy to use higher abstracted layer of coding could do similar, and create a new kind of less technical programmer class.

[verisimi]

Yes.

Could AI generated code mean the death of coding?

I'm wondering if, ultimately, you can get rid of the language as a part that you think about at all. Why not allow the AI to create a language that best suits it? Perhaps this would be hard to read for a human, but who cares? In fact, this would be a good thing for whoever owns the AI.

The issue then will become - as you say - to represent the problem well at a higher level of abstraction. Representation of the problem and knowing what a 'right' answer should be.

[qayxc]

> Could AI generated code mean the death of coding?

A rose by any other name...

"Coding" is the formalisation of ideas, algorithms, requirements, and constrains. This task is and will continue to be challenging. Whether you use "prompt engineering" or a formalised language doesn't matter all that much.

I'd be more interested to see whether such black-box model can solve programming problems like returning the best (by some criteria) N items from a read-only medium using a limited amount of resources (e.g. x amount of RAM and t milliseconds).

Given the immense amount of training data it's hard to distinguish a clever search method with some mixing and matching (i.e. copy-paste-programming) from general problem solving abilities.