I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it.

Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.

I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.

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sitzkrieg 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

no one uses ai to one shot system design because they cant. it will fuck up in any moderate sized project

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echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems.

But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.

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prmph 3 days ago | parent [-]

> But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.

You cannot and never will, because of shannon entropy.

How many non-trivially distinct programs are definable by the few words of the prompt on such a button?

	▲	echelon 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not so sure. "Todo app" has a pretty recognizable shape. As does "photo app", "music streaming app", etc. If you're not happy and if you incrementally add more constraints, that's no different from human elicitation. Imagine engineering the interface for some kind of magical app factory. It'll probably be like that.

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osigurdson 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there really a large delta between computer programming, coding, computer science and software engineering?

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skydhash 3 days ago | parent [-]

If we're sticking with the accepted definitions, there is.

Computer programming is the idea of making a computer do some task in an automated manner by giving it instructions that it will follow.

Coding is using some kind of language for the above. You take some a spec and you transform it into a textual representation.

Computer science is mostly about studying what the computer can do and what it cannot. It is the actual foundation of everything

Software engineering is about producing software by following engineering principles. Coding is a small part of it. It's mostly about getting things done reliably. The constraints are rarely technical, but mostly about coordination and resources usage.

Most people talks about computer programming when they should talk about software engineering. Computer programming is easy and we have a lot of tools to assists with coding technicalities. Software engineering is hard and the more you do it, the more you see that the problem is mostly about truly understanding what needs to be done and do it well.

	▲	osigurdson 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		According to these definitions, everyone who writes any code is doing computer programming and coding. This is not a role really, just like "pliers user" doesn't describe a role just something that many roles may do. Software engineering is management and writing of specs. Of course if one were to write a spec in a completely unambiguous way, it would be code.

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zelphirkalt 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is, that someone will need to maintain the stuff you don't care about. That slop CSS you just committed? Someone will either need to understand it later, or perpetuate the slop using more AI tools. It is in all our interest to care about the little things as well. Even if it is round corners of a button.