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IanCal 3 days ago

I massively agree. Huge amounts of coding isn’t wild new inventions, it’s not unknowable work like so many seem to suggest when asked to estimate time. Frankly it’s not even conceptually hard, it’s just that computers are fast and accurate and dumb so you need to be annoyingly precise. Imagine if a human refuses to read a manual because a comma should have been a semicolon. Plenty of people are smart enough to do it, but lack either the knowledge about this or the desire to deal with it.

Most of this work should go away. Much of the rest of it should be achievable by the domain experts themselves at a fraction of the cost.

tptacek 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language.

Instead, it's the opposite.

jimbokun 3 days ago | parent [-]

But that’s the problem.

The LLMs are still generating all that rote shit, that at some point must be maintained and read and understood. Potentially at a higher rate than any human could.

A lot of what AI coders are being praised for could be accomplished just as well with some good Lisp macros with much less technical debt.

tptacek 3 days ago | parent [-]

I understand what you're saying. But in the programming environments I work in, the rote stuff that LLMs are automating is marginally better than the rote stuff I would write given the same parameters. Obviously, we could all do better if only we were writing the right Lisp macros. ;)