If you allow llm to infect code, you will have no programmers that can code once your pre-ai ones (like linus) phase out.
It’s not really ai that is the problem but the skills it eliminates. You can’t properly fix bad ai code if you don’t do code without ai, you will not gain the experience of decades of manually coding properly.
The most experienced coders that exist today are the equivalent of artisanal stone carvers and wood workers who built some of the most beautiful buildings that exist of older times. Modern construction methods phased them out and now the number of people with their skill is tiny worldwide compared to thousands of them in every country in the past.
The tech industry is going to eat itself and won’t realise until it’s too late.
Okay but 99% of corporate codebases are already insane crap. The LLMs write boring, overly safe code, but at least they don’t make obvious IDOR bugs like my human coworkers.
Yeah but when you’re gone nobody is going to even be able to tell the difference between one set of code or the other. Instead the competent programmers will be replaced with tech priests preaching to the machine.
Embracing this technology eliminates competency. Consider how the art industry is currently refusing to embrace it and instead fighting it, what does this do? It ensures that the future has artists who remain competent and does not turn the field of art into a bunch of people who give prompts to an AI.
To really understand this you need to imagine a future where the art field embraced AI and all manual art stops, instead being replaced by people that give prompts to AI to make art. This is the future of the programming field by embracing AI. All future programmers when the manual programmers phase out will just be people that only know how to prompt.
It is incredibly shortsighted and only the realisation that everyone in the field will become like ai “artists” once the current experience phases out really makes this clear. It will suffer a total skill collapse.
But the art field is making final products that have no formal correctness. The programming field is making infrastructure that never gets seen by end users, and we do have formal verification. Two completely different things.
The skill collapse already happened after the 90s which is why all the software is so shit right now. Now the competent people can take over again and rewrite everything in immutable functional languages with complete unit test coverage and viral copyleft licenses.
Yeah but if they don’t write code they won’t learn. A lot of coding isn’t really like learning to drive a car and once you know how you’re done, it’s a persistent lifelong accumulation of experience in architecture.
The field absolutely will suffer a skill collapse when the existing generations of experienced pre-ai programmers phase out. There is no replacement mechanism in the system and the industry is young enough to have never even had to think about this problem ever occurring.
I’m not pro-LLM but this already happens all the time at corporate levels when the bean counters decide to fire (usually constructively dismiss) their senior talent. They have a complex codebase that captures domain specific logic well and uses good practices but then they try to have a dev team that’s half the size and 1/10th as experienced try and fail to maintain it. Then customers complain and it gets poorly patched over and over again until something important breaks and they have to stop touching entire parts of the stack or they leak a db dump or get ransomed or the site goes from 99.9999% uptime to 90%.
I do understand that at an industry level you’re describing something like the memes where only millennials can edit a pdf because the boomers/gen x never tried to learn tech and the zoomers were never exposed to non-mobile-app workflows as kids. Where the skill itself is mostly generationally bound. But I do think the skillet will remain, just not at the corporate shovelware factories where it was already actively despised as a cost center to be done away with at the earliest opportunity. Because they already deskill there! And outsource with zero investigation of competency (not a dig at workers getting the outsourced jobs, even the ones that don’t know their stuff, because hell yeah I salute that).
Makes me think it is also representative of the trend in physical production and construction. In the US there were decades of high output. Starting nineteenth century, even more after WW2. But then everything became complacent, outsourced, unmaintained, deregulated.
It is a general trend for sure, not a new innovation. Like elon musk doging the government. Same effect. Now all that skill is gone. Did you see the post that FBI now can now hire people with criminal records of bestiality?
All the stuff about Iran vs US military production and capacity also. Iran was exempted from the trend due to circumstances.
Maybe they try to eliminate the middle class as much as possible so it will not be an annoyance for them in the future.
I actually disagree with a lot of people here.
If you allow llm to infect code, you will have no programmers that can code once your pre-ai ones (like linus) phase out.
It’s not really ai that is the problem but the skills it eliminates. You can’t properly fix bad ai code if you don’t do code without ai, you will not gain the experience of decades of manually coding properly.
The most experienced coders that exist today are the equivalent of artisanal stone carvers and wood workers who built some of the most beautiful buildings that exist of older times. Modern construction methods phased them out and now the number of people with their skill is tiny worldwide compared to thousands of them in every country in the past.
The tech industry is going to eat itself and won’t realise until it’s too late.
Okay but 99% of corporate codebases are already insane crap. The LLMs write boring, overly safe code, but at least they don’t make obvious IDOR bugs like my human coworkers.
I’ve seen LLMs put sensitive secrets in git just like any incompetent junior dev
Harness + got hooks + formal verification trivially prevents everything like that. You’re just holding it wrong.
Yeah but when you’re gone nobody is going to even be able to tell the difference between one set of code or the other. Instead the competent programmers will be replaced with tech priests preaching to the machine.
Embracing this technology eliminates competency. Consider how the art industry is currently refusing to embrace it and instead fighting it, what does this do? It ensures that the future has artists who remain competent and does not turn the field of art into a bunch of people who give prompts to an AI.
To really understand this you need to imagine a future where the art field embraced AI and all manual art stops, instead being replaced by people that give prompts to AI to make art. This is the future of the programming field by embracing AI. All future programmers when the manual programmers phase out will just be people that only know how to prompt.
It is incredibly shortsighted and only the realisation that everyone in the field will become like ai “artists” once the current experience phases out really makes this clear. It will suffer a total skill collapse.
But the art field is making final products that have no formal correctness. The programming field is making infrastructure that never gets seen by end users, and we do have formal verification. Two completely different things.
The skill collapse already happened after the 90s which is why all the software is so shit right now. Now the competent people can take over again and rewrite everything in immutable functional languages with complete unit test coverage and viral copyleft licenses.
Cool! Where is the git repo?
Im still working on it but you can use Pharo for now
This is why anyone who uses llms should know how to code and they should review the code.
People don’t exactly stay on top of their game by reviewing slop code.
You don’t learn that stuff get your degree and remain an expert for the rest of your life.
Yeah but if they don’t write code they won’t learn. A lot of coding isn’t really like learning to drive a car and once you know how you’re done, it’s a persistent lifelong accumulation of experience in architecture.
The field absolutely will suffer a skill collapse when the existing generations of experienced pre-ai programmers phase out. There is no replacement mechanism in the system and the industry is young enough to have never even had to think about this problem ever occurring.
I’m not pro-LLM but this already happens all the time at corporate levels when the bean counters decide to fire (usually constructively dismiss) their senior talent. They have a complex codebase that captures domain specific logic well and uses good practices but then they try to have a dev team that’s half the size and 1/10th as experienced try and fail to maintain it. Then customers complain and it gets poorly patched over and over again until something important breaks and they have to stop touching entire parts of the stack or they leak a db dump or get ransomed or the site goes from 99.9999% uptime to 90%.
I do understand that at an industry level you’re describing something like the memes where only millennials can edit a pdf because the boomers/gen x never tried to learn tech and the zoomers were never exposed to non-mobile-app workflows as kids. Where the skill itself is mostly generationally bound. But I do think the skillet will remain, just not at the corporate shovelware factories where it was already actively despised as a cost center to be done away with at the earliest opportunity. Because they already deskill there! And outsource with zero investigation of competency (not a dig at workers getting the outsourced jobs, even the ones that don’t know their stuff, because hell yeah I salute that).
Makes me think it is also representative of the trend in physical production and construction. In the US there were decades of high output. Starting nineteenth century, even more after WW2. But then everything became complacent, outsourced, unmaintained, deregulated.
It is a general trend for sure, not a new innovation. Like elon musk doging the government. Same effect. Now all that skill is gone. Did you see the post that FBI now can now hire people with criminal records of bestiality?
All the stuff about Iran vs US military production and capacity also. Iran was exempted from the trend due to circumstances.
Maybe they try to eliminate the middle class as much as possible so it will not be an annoyance for them in the future.
Ok but if you put it like that it doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
Until you realise that software is in everything from government services, to hospitals, to the means of communication
A lot of that is still paper records here.
Or COBOL that nobody dares to touch anyway.
But like, for job security
Surely in 50 years it would be ok if the only people that hand wrote C/C++/rust were Amish or working on an obscure hobby.
Like sure everything sucks now and will suck in 5 years, but remember cold fusion only took 50 years.