My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.

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mikkupikku 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn!

Attitude as old as time itself.

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Chinjut 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, "An LLM is just a new higher level programming language", sure. A new programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them.

(Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)

	▲	bitwize an hour ago \| parent [-]
		(And the behavior of any given C implementation is completely defined.)

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dtagames 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right? Some of us used to read hex digits off printed paper dumps to debug mainframe memory (like me), but we can be excited about AI and embrace it, too.

From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.

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hyperhello 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You mock, but not very persuasively. You seem to be relying on a silly idea you don't even believe in: that someone, once, made fun of C programming.

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napsec 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.

	▲	SpaceNoodled 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have some bad news for you

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operatingthetan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking.

Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.

	▲	bigstrat2003 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The AI does not, in fact, produce working code.

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mikkupikku 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.

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skydhash 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft.

Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).

I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).

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signatoremo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code.

This is remarkably sloppy for someone who codes. No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence.

	▲	skydhash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence Strong opinions, loosely held. What I’ve seen seems to confirm that opinion, so I’m still holding on to it.

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qsera 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it should be called dice-coding, not vibe-coding. You roll the LLM dice, and sometimes it comes with the right looking program on the top.

Since the dice is loaded heavily, this happens quite often. This makes people think that the dice can program.