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I loved learning Computer Engineering in college because it de-mystified the black box that was the PC I used growing up. I learned how it worked holistically, from physics to logic gates to processing units to kernels/operating systems to networking/applications.

It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.

by h4ch15 hours ago|

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I personally don't "hate" LLMs but I see the pattern of their usage as slightly alarming; but at the same time I see the appeal of it.

Offloading your thinking, typing all the garbled thoughts in your head with respect to a problem in a prompt and getting a coherent, tailored solution in almost an instant. A superpowered crutch that helps you coast through tiring work.

That crutch soon transforms into dependence and before you know it you start saying things like "Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code".

by samiv4 hours ago|

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And before you realize you're nothing more but a prompter ready to be displaced by someone cheaper.

by Quothling3 hours ago|

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I think a lot of people, regardless of whether they vibe code or not are going to be replaced by a cheaper sollution. A lot of software that would've required programmers before can now be created by tech savy employees in their respective fields. Sure it'll suck, but it's not like that matters for a lot of software. Software Engineering and Computer Science aren't going away, but I suspect a lot of programming is.

by blauditore3 hours ago|

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Ah yes, like no-code programming in the past, or what was it called again?

by Quothling52 minutes ago|

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I've been around for a while. The closest we ever got was probably RPA. This time it's different. In my organisation we have non-programmers writing software that brings them business value on quite a large scale. Right now it's mainly through the chat framework we provide them so that they aren't just spamming data into chatGPT or similar. A couple of them figured out how to work the API and set up their own agents though.

Most of it is rather terrible, but a lot of the times it really doesn't matter. At least most of it scales better than Excel, and for the most part they can debug/fix their issues with more prompts. The stuff that turns out to matter eventually makes it to my team, and then it usually gets rewritten from scratch.

I think you underestimate how easy it is to get something to work well enough with AI.

by falcor841 hours ago|

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It's called Excel, and there's probably more logic written in it driving the world economy than in all the rest of the programming languages combined.

by SV_BubbleTime2 hours ago|

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I assume he’s mostly joking but… how often do you look at the assembly of your code?

To the AI optimist, the idea of reading code line by line will see as antiquated as perusing CPU registers line by line. Something do when needed, but typically can just trust your tooling to do the right thing.

I wouldn’t say I am in that camp, but that’s one thought on the matter. That natural language becomes “the code” and the actual code becomes “machine language”.