I loved learning Computer Engineering in college because it de-mystified the black box that was the PC I used growing up. I learned how it worked holistically, from physics to logic gates to processing units to kernels/operating systems to networking/applications.
It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.
I personally don't "hate" LLMs but I see the pattern of their usage as slightly alarming; but at the same time I see the appeal of it.
Offloading your thinking, typing all the garbled thoughts in your head with respect to a problem in a prompt and getting a coherent, tailored solution in almost an instant. A superpowered crutch that helps you coast through tiring work.
That crutch soon transforms into dependence and before you know it you start saying things like "Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code".
I think a lot of people, regardless of whether they vibe code or not are going to be replaced by a cheaper sollution. A lot of software that would've required programmers before can now be created by tech savy employees in their respective fields. Sure it'll suck, but it's not like that matters for a lot of software. Software Engineering and Computer Science aren't going away, but I suspect a lot of programming is.
I assume he’s mostly joking but… how often do you look at the assembly of your code?
To the AI optimist, the idea of reading code line by line will see as antiquated as perusing CPU registers line by line. Something do when needed, but typically can just trust your tooling to do the right thing.
I wouldn’t say I am in that camp, but that’s one thought on the matter. That natural language becomes “the code” and the actual code becomes “machine language”.
And you could say that the difference is that high-level languages are deterministically transformed down, but in practice the compiler is so complex you'd have no idea what it's doing and most people don't look at the machine code anyway. You may as well take a look at the LLM's prompt and make an assumption of the high-level code that it spits out.
Honestly I'm not so strongly opiniated now as I was a few weeks ago. I'm in a huge questioning phase about my work/craft/hobby.
I've worked places where junior made bad code that was accepted because the QA tests were ok.
I even had a situation in production where we had memory leaks because nobody tried to use it for more than 20 minutes when we knew that the app is used 24/7.
We aim for 99% quality when no-one wants it.
No-one wants to pay for it.
Github is down to one 9 and I haven't heard them losing many clients, people just cope.
We've reached a level where we have so much ram that we find garbage collection and immutability normal, even desired.
We are wasting bandwidth by using json instead of binary because it's easier to read when have to debug, because it's easier to debug while running than to think before coding.
I built a system that can hold 40,000 concurrent users with hardly 2 GiB of RAM, a bit of bandwidth (with a 300 Mbps connection it works great) using Capnproto and that I am scaling horizontally.
A server with 6 cores can hold at least 3 of these services. Now think of customers. How much you are going to save in operations? Loooooots! For backend efficiency and quality is still a critical metric, especially when operations are so cheap (tens of dollars per month).
Truly one of the statements of all time. I hope you look at the code, even frontier agents make serious lapses in "judgement".