[JusticeJuice]

You'd be surprised. I know a few people who couldn't really code before LLMs, but now with LLMs they can just brute-force through problems. They seem pretty undetered about 'trusting' the solution, if they ran it and it worked for them, it gets shipped.

[tcoff91]

Well I hope this isn’t backend code because the amount of vulnerabilities that are going to come from these practices will be staggering

[namaria]

The backlash will be enormous. In the near future, there will be less competent coders and a tsunami of bad code to fix. If 2020 was annoying to hiring managers they have no idea how bad it will become.

[Eisenstein]

Of course this will be the case, but probably not for the reasons you are concerned about. It is because a lot of people have been enabled by these tools to realize they are able to do things they thought were beyond them.

The opaque wall that separates the solution from the problem in technology often comes from the very steep initial learning curve. The reason most people who are developers now learned to code is because they had free time when they were young, had access to the technology, and were motivated to do it.

But as an adult, very few people are able to get past the first obstacles which keep them from eventually becoming proficient, but now they have a cheat code. So you will see a lot more capable programmers in the future who will be able to help you fix this backlog of bad code -- we just have to wait for them to gain the experience and knowledge needed before that happens and deal with the mistakes along the way.

This is no different from any other enabling technology. The people who feel like they had to struggle through it and pay their dues when it 'wasn't easy' are going to be resentful and try and gatekeep; it is only human nature.

[MrMcCall]

> This is no different from any other enabling technology.

Coding is unique. One can't replace considered, forward-thinking data flow design reasoning with fancy guesswork and triage.

Should anyone build a complex brick wall by just iterating over the possible solutions? Hell no. That's what expertise is for, and that is only attained via hard graft, and predicting the next word is not going to be a viable substitute.

It's all a circle jerk of people hoping for a magic box.

[Eisenstein]

When did you learn to code? What access did you have to technology when you started? How much free time did you have? What kind of education did you have?

Are you really unique because you are one of only a few special people who can code because of some innate ability? Or is it that you have above average intelligence, have a rather uncommon but certainly not rare ability to think a certain way, and had an opportunity and interest which honed those talents to do something most people can't?

How would you feel if you never had access to a computer with a dev environment until you were an adult, and then someone told you not to bother learning how to code because you aren't special like they are?

The 'magic box' is a way to get past the wall that requires people to spend 3 hours trying to figure out what python environments are before they can even write a program that does anything useful.

[skydhash]

I read a lot of books. While I had some fundamental in high school, I really started in college and the tricks was to read books for the theorical parts, read articles for advices and specific walkthroughs, read code for examples of implementation, and then solve problems to intenalize all of that reading.

But it all compounds. Going from reading to doing takes little time and I’m able to use much denser information repositories.

If you have to spend three hours reading about python environments, that’s just a signal that your foundation is lacking (you don’t know how your tools work). Using LLM is flying blind and hoping you will land instead of crashing.

[MrMcCall]

You must have replied to the wrong post, because I never said anything about myself being "unique" or otherwise differently talented than others, though that is possible. I don't measure myself against others; if they have a better insight into something I will gladly learn from them, without ego.

I'm talking about the fact that programming is a unique human endeavor, and a damned difficult one at that.

> How would you feel if you never had access to a computer with a dev environment until you were an adult, and then someone told you not to bother learning how to code because you aren't special like they are?

I would never say some stupid shit like that, to anyone, ever. If they want to do it, I would encourage them and give them basic advice to help them on their way. And I IN NO WAY believe that I am more talented at programming than ANYONE else on Earth. The experience I have earned from raw, hard graft across various programming environments and projects is my only advantage in a conversion about software development. But I firmly believe that a basic linux install and python, C, and bash will be enough to allow anyone to reach a level of basic professional proficiency.

You are WAY out of pocket here, my friend, or perhaps you just don't understand English very well.

> When did you learn to code? What access did you have to technology when you started? How much free time did you have? What kind of education did you have?

Getting to learn BASIC on an Apple (2e?) in 6th grade was fantastic for me; it was love at first goto. But having a C64 in 9th Grade was pivotal to the development of my fundamental skills and mindset, and I was very lucky to be in a nice house with the time to write programs for fun, and an 11th grade AP CS course with a very good teacher and TRS80s. But we were very much lower middle class, which factored into my choice of college and how well I did there. But, absolutely, I am a very, very lucky human being, yet tenacity via passion is the key to my success, and is not beyond ANYONE else.

> The 'magic box' is a way to get past the wall that requires people to spend 3 hours trying to figure out what python environments are before they can even write a program that does anything useful.

If you say so, but no one should be learning to program in a specific python env or doing anything "useful" except for personal exploration or rudimentary classwork.

Educating ourselves about how to logically program -- types, vars, fcts, files -- is our first "useful" programming any of us will be able to do for some years, which is no different than how an auto mechanic will ramp up to professional levels of proficiency, from changing oil to beyond.

With the internet in 2025, however, I'm sure people can learn more quickly, but if and only if they have the drive to do so.

[naasking]

> The backlash will be enormous. In the near future, there will be less competent coders and a tsunami of bad code to fix

These code AIs are just going to get better and better. Fixing this "tsunami of bad code" will consist of just passing it through the better AIs that will easily just fix most of the problems. I can't help but feel like this will be mostly a non-problem in the end.

[dns_snek]

> Fixing this "tsunami of bad code" will consist of just passing it through the better AIs that will easily just fix most of the problems.

At this point in time there's no obvious path to that reality, it's just unfounded optimism and I don't think it's particularly healthy. What happens 5, 10, or 20 years down the line when this magical solution doesn't arrive?

[naasking]

I don't know where you're getting your data that there's no obvious path, or that it's unfounded optimism. When the chatbots first came out they were unusable for code, now they're borderline good for many tasks and excellent at others, and it's only been a couple of years. Every tool has its limitations at any given time, and I think your pessimism is entirely speculative.

[dns_snek]

What we have now are LLMs that some consider to be good at tasks that are incremental, limited in scope, and require constant human oversight with many iterations.

What you want is an LLM that is exceptionally good at completely rewriting a poorly written codebase spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, which works reliably with minimal oversight and without introducing hundreds of critical and hard to diagnose bugs.

Not realizing that these tasks are many orders of magnitudes apart in complexity is where the "unfounded optimism" comment comes from.

[krupan]

Nobody has to prove a negative, my friend