[CharlieDigital]

It's a shame because to guide a coding agent, you need to have the right grammar and vocabulary to describe what you want and how you want it to be built. Junior devs should read not because they need to know how to write the code, but they need to know the vocabulary and the grammar to guide the agents.

[Gigachad]

At work we had a dispute over if AI should be allowed in the technical interview, we resolved it by both running an AI allowed and not allowed interview. Something interesting we found is that every candidate either passed or failed both. People who could not program manually without AI were not able to get the agent to complete the tasks either.

I've seen people type questions in to the LLM and get the answer they asked for but not the one they needed/wanted because they didn't have the correct terminology.

[natebc]

Junior devs should still read to learn how to write the code.

Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right?

[CharlieDigital]

    > Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right?

Shaping up like that in my org. At least one mid-career dev says he no longer looks at code.

I still look at code and find that agents work best when I write the foundation and then vibe on top of my hand-written code. Works extremely well because agent picks up my style accurately.

[majormajor]

Hopefully your management is trying to answer the following question: is said middle-career dev outproducing their past self, and others who still look at code, with:

1) submitted changes that don't need any more revision than their previous human-written ones when it comes to code review?

2) no increase in bug incidents

3) no slow-down in peer work or future work caused by humans-or-agents having to fight increasingly overly-complicated, poorly-factored, copypasta-style code or god methods? (this might not be evident yet)

(Another question is how well is this person doing their job as a reviewer, making sure to keep the product quality bar high, without looking at code?)

Anyone in an org with coworkers no longer writing code needs to be making sure their managers have a pulse on the long-term health of the product to see who's doing it well (lots of test coverage, shipping only super-high-quality, refined-from-multiple angles stuff) or just being lazy (shipping first drafts that continually add debt to various files and methods).

[eclipxe]

Do you know how to operate a punch card?

[merlincorey]

Yes, and IBM has current documentation if you need to that has been updated in 2026: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.2.0?topic=considerations-u...

It's generally and simply an encoding of what amounts to binary machine code which you translate via assembly code acting as a deterministic compiler from assembly to machine code if you are doing it manually.

LLMs aren't a deterministic process and human languages aren't as clear as machine code and assembly.

[fghorow]

O.M.G.

I last used a card punch in circa 1980 or thereabouts...

[wpollock]

> Do you know how to operate a punch card?

I remember! You created a control card, with tab stops and other controls, wrapped it around a control drum, and then had an easy time punching your source FORTRAN!

I just looked and found my old control drum, in the back of my junk drawer. But I can't find an old punch card machine in there, most have lost it somehow.

[natebc]

Yes. But Python isn't punch cards behind the scenes so it's not the same thing at all.

Besides. You're not asking <AGENT OF THE WEEK> to produce punch cards to jam into the PDP.

[Scoundreller]

someone needs to try this

[mook]

I've never programmed before good compilers existed, but I still know some assembly. For what I currently do it's used rarely, but it's still quite valuable on occasion. I don't see any reason LLM-assisted programming wouldn't be like that; for sure the various C compilers sure seem like they're trying just as hard to produce results you don't want.

[eric__cartman]

If I transported you to the 1960s and gave you a wizard that could punch cards for you with a chance of making a mistake, would you still bother to learn how to operate a punch card?

What would you do if the wizard gets stuck? Coarse the wizard into making the black box work through somebody else's direct perspective on the problem?

[CharlieDigital]

I don't think this is comparable.

It's more like a restaurant. You give an order and a little while later, a finished dish appears.

The difference between a Chipotle and a Michelin starred establishment is that Chipotle is just assembling a mass produced good. A Michelin chef knows their ingredients inside and out; knows the science of how those ingredients work; knows varied techniques to extract flavors, create textures, etc.

Anyone can work in a Chipotle; few can achieve a Michelin star.

[ares623]

Do you let your Jenkins re-inference your entire program from markdown files on each push?

[jhide]

Do you maintain a system in which punch cards play a critical role?

[sodafountan]

I was wondering about this myself, but given everything I know about AI. Won't the vocabulary slowly and subtly change as common people try to develop software, not knowing the jargon? Won't the AI systems learn from the prompts and adjust their understanding of what's trying to be accomplished?

[CharlieDigital]

It will regress to the mean.

The default output of any agent is going to be Transaction Script, for example. It will never on its own accord start writing Domain Model.

As it produces more Transaction Script and sesles its own Transaction Script, it will regress to this paradigm.

You can get it to write Domain Model, but that is not its default.

I liken it to examples in docs: they are always intentionally the simplest case.

[add-sub-mul-div]

And to operate a self-driving car safely you need to keep your attention on the road so you can take over quickly when needed.

But that's not how human nature works. Most people take the path of least resistance. Especially when the primary purpose of the invention is to offer convenience.