I always hated SEO because it was not an exact science - like programming was.

Too bad we've now managed to turn programming into the same annoying guesswork.

I don't really think it is turning into a guesswork. A lot of people wrote bad code before by pasting things from the internet they didn't understand. I think some people are using LLMs the same way, but it does not mean that programming has changed. But I do think that code quality is being neglected nowadays.

	▲	fragmede 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Programming has changed. Agentic coding, where I go back and forth with the AI to generste a spec along with tooling and exit criteria, and then the AI goes off for hour(s) (possibly helped by harness/tooling like Ralph Wiggum), and then do the same thing for a different spec/feature/bug fix and the AI goes off and does that. Repeat until out of tokens. That was previously not how programming went. We can quibble as to how much that is or is not "programming", but on a post about Claude code, what's relevant is that's how things are today. How much code review is done after the AI agent stops churning is relevant to the question of code quality out the other end, but to the question at hand, "has programming changed", either has, or what I'm doing is no longer programming. The semantics are less interesting to me, the point is, when I sit down at my computer to make code happen so I can deliver software to customers, the very nature of what I do has changed.