[Traubenfuchs]

We recently got Claude Code and there is a very strong push to use it.

I recently did for the first time. Spent 15 minutes writing a long prompt to implement a ticket. A repeated pattern of code, 5 classes + config per topic that deeply interact with each other and it did the job perfectly.

It convinced me that the current code monkey jobs, which are >90%, >95%? of software engineering jobs, will disappear within 10 years.

We‘ll only need senior/staff/architect level code reviewers and prompt engineers.

When the last generation that manually wrote code dies out, all people will do is prompting.

Just like assembler became a niche, just like C became a niche, high level languages will become a niche.

If you still don‘t believe, you haven‘t tried the advanced tools that can modify a whole project, are too incompetent to properly prompt or indeed work in one of the rare, arcane frontier- state-of-the-art niches where AI can‘t help.

[bakugo]

> We‘ll only need senior/staff/architect level code reviewers and prompt engineers.

And what will you do when all the seniors retire and there's no juniors to take their place because they were replaced by AI?

[Traubenfuchs]

In college, newcomers will start with the basics of high level languages and then spend the rest of the time learning prompting.

Just like nowadays assembler is only a side note, C is only taught in specialized classes (OS, graphics) and most things are taught in high level languages.

[bakugo]

How will they be able to review AI generated code if they don't understand anything beyond the basics?

[dagw]

How will they be able to review AI generated code

The same way most of us review our compiler generated code today (ie not at all). If it works it works, if doesn't we fix the higher level input and try again. I won't be surprised if in a few more generation the AI will skip the human readable code step and generate ASTs directly.

[bakugo]

> if doesn't we fix the higher level input and try again

How can I visit this fantasy world of yours where LLMs are as reliable and deterministic as compilers and any mistakes can be blamed solely on the user?

[dagw]

How can I visit this fantasy world of yours...

Wait 20 years.

[benreesman]

I think I have a pretty different view, though maybe it hinges on the bit about 9 in 10 software people being code monkeys, or what that means. To the extent I agree that LLMs are going to eliminate coding jobs (permanently), they're going to be the ones you could basically do with StackOverflow and Google (when those things worked).

I think there's a cohort thing going on here, because Google has been spam rekt for long enough that entire classes of students have graduated, entered the workforce, and been promoted all since search and SO went to hell, so the gizmo that has the working code and you just need to describe it seems totally novel.

But we've been through this before: one day there's this box and you type a question and bam, reasonable code. Joing a FAANG is kind of like that too: you do the mega grep for parse_sockaddr_trie and there's this beautifully documented thing with like, here's the paper where it shows its O(ln).

But you call the thing and it seems to work and you send the diff and the senior person is like, that doesn't do IPv6 and that's rolling to us next quarter, you should add IPv6. And the thing was exploiting the octets and so its hard.

The thing is, a sigmoid looks exactly like an exponential when you're standing on it. But it never is. Even a nuclear bomb is exponential very briefly (and ChatGPT is not a nuclear bomb, not if it was 100x more capable).

Think about defense, or trading, or anything competitive like that: now you need the LLM because the other guy has it too. But he's not watching YouTube all day, he's still chain-smoking and taking adderall except he has an LLM now too.

So yeah, in the world where any of 9 TypeScript frameworks would all make roughly the same dark mode website and any of them get the acquisition done because really the founder knows a guy? That job is really risky right now.

But low effort shit is always risky unless you're the founder who knows a guy.

[blueflow]

Will all its consequences for software correctness and security. Man, I wish i was born in the neolithic.

[Traubenfuchs]

Humans still deploy SQL injectable code to production and offer unsecured heapdump endpoints…

[xela79]

> We‘ll only need senior/staff/architect level code reviewers

the problem with that is that if there are no juniors left...