> 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 7 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;)