[Razengan]

> …LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime.

If you see magazines articles or TV shows and ads from the 1980s (a fun rabbit hole on YouTube, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was that "Computers can do anything, if you just program them."

Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. (except the outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :')

OS makers like Microsoft/Apple/etc all had their own ideas about how we should make apps and none of them wanted to work together and still don't.

With phones & "AI" everywhere we are actually closer to that original promise of everyone having a computer and being able to do anything with it, that isn't solely dictated by corporations and their prepackaged apps:

Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on your iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get a custom app right away just for you on your device.

[atomic128]

Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions.

Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.

Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.

This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.

That era is ending.

[rixed]

That era ended 20 years ago. It's called "industrialization", a process that has happened to many other crafts in the past. AI is just the latest blow.

[Razengan]

...is that comment written by an LLM?

Human programmers are frequently hamstrung by human politics and economies.

Hell, even major developers like Google and Facebook still fight against letting iPhone apps run on iPad, for example. YouTube still doesn't support Picture-in-Picture on iPad.

It took YEARs for some big apps to just adopt Dark Mode. The best paid programmers on the planet, wtf?

If the power of AI isn't artificially crippled I could be able to just say "Make me a native app for browsing {DumbWebsiteThatRefusesToProvideAnApp}" or "Fix HN's crap formatting" and just get on with my life the way I want without having to beg or fight our Corpo Gods.