> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.

Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.

The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.

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dataviz1000 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know

The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.

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hnuser123456 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible.

A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.

	▲	dataviz1000 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but they only became more important to understand how they worked Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations. A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding. Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain. [0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/

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ShinyLeftPad 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't see it.

1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it?

2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ......

3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)

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ttoinou 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there

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ShinyLeftPad 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve

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ttoinou 4 hours ago | parent [-]

With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI

Juniors now need to be more skilled than before

	▲	ShinyLeftPad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something? > spin up and manage dozens of juniors Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.

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sublinear 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".

	▲	ttoinou 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience