- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Describing what they want in plain, human language is impossible for stakeholders.
‘I want you to make me a Facebook-killer app with agentive AI and blockchains. Why is that so hard for you code monkeys to understand?’
You forgot we run on fritos, tab, and mountain dew.
Maybe he want to write damn login page himself.
Not say it out loud. Not stupid… Just proud.
Even writing an RFC for a mildly complicated feature to mostly describe it takes so many words and communication with stakeholders that it can be a full time job. Imagine an entire app.
Getting ai to do a complex problem correctly takes so much detailed explanation, it’s quicker to do it myself
While it’s possible to see gains in complex problems through brute force, learning more about prompt engineering is a powerful way to save time, money, tokens and frustration.
I see a lot of people saying, “I tried it and it didn’t work,” but have they read the guides or just jumped right in?
For example, if you haven’t read the claude code guide, you might have never setup mcp servers or taken advantage of slash commands.
Your CLAUDE.md might be trash, and maybe you’re using @file wrong and blowing tokens or biasing your context wrong.
LLMs context windows can only scale so far before you start seeing diminishing returns, especially if the model or tools is compacting it.
- Plan first, using planning modes to help you, decomposition the plan
- Have the model keep track of important context externally (like in markdown files with checkboxes) so the model can recover when the context gets fucked up
https://www.promptingguide.ai/
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices
There are community guides that take this even further, but these are some starting references I found very valuable.
So even more work than actual coding.
Everyone is a senior engineer with an idiot intern now.
Early adopters will be rewarded by having better methodology by the time the tooling catches up.
Too busy trying to dunk on me than understand that you have some really helpful tools already.
While you’re right that it’s a new technology and not everyone is using it right, if it requires all of that setup and infrastructure to work then are we sure it provides a material benefit. Most projects never get that kind of attention at all, to require it for AI integration means that currently it may be more work than it’s worth.
This is why I say some people are going to lose their jobs to engineers using AI correctly, lol.
When growing up in the 70’s “computer programmers” were assumed to be geniuses. Nowadays they are maybe one tier above fast food workers. What a world!
Well to be fair if you’re a programmer in the 70s you might as well be a genius.
Nowadays they are maybe one tier above fast food workers.
:-/
Having worked both jobs, I could point to a few differences
Food is essential, the new shiny way to gobble more RAM to display a blue mushroom in a button isn’t.
Explicit programmers are needed because the general public has failed to learn programming. Hiding the complexity behind nice interfaces makes it actually more difficult to understand programming.
This comes all from programmers using programs to abstract programming away.
What if the 2030s change the approach and use AI to teach everybody how to program?
I’m afraid I cant let you do that, Dave.
You’ve not read the manual.
the general public has failed to learn programming
That’s like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.
There are certain things that it just doesn’t make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.
People bake and learn basic chemistry. The baseline of general programming knowledge could be more than zero. It’s a fundamental part of our society.
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I I I I IV IV I I V IV I IV
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So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.
What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.
For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:
1 2 3 4 I III IV iv I vi ii V7 So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.
As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.
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You can add SQL in the 70s. It was created to be human readable so business people could write sql queries themselves without programmers.
Ironically, one of the universal things I’ve noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking “why am I writing SQL? I’ll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!” resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague’s code base and found two classes named “OR.cs” and “AND.cs”. All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of “OR” and “AND” were ever to change in future versions of SQL.
By that logic could we say the same about compilers.
Or anything above assembly.
Real programmers use punchcards.
So is COBOL.
(Is there any sane alternative to SQL?)
AWK?
(Is there any sane alternative to SQL?)
Yes, no SQL.
Oh cool.
So I still program like it’s the 1980s?
Makes me feel proficient. XD
Least it’s an improvement over no/low code. You can dig in and unfuck some ai code easily enough but god help you if your no code platform has a bug that only their support team can fix. Not to mention the vendor lock in and licensing costs that come with it.
Doesn’t matter if they can replace coders. If CEOs think it can, it will.
And now, it’s good enough to look like it works so the CEO can just push the problem down the road and get an instant stock inflation
And then it’ll all go to shit and proper programmers will be able to charge bank to sort it out.
If ChatGPT’s browser is just another chromium clone and they couldn’t get their own AI to write a browser, I doubt other customers of theirs will get their shitbot to write code for them either.
The most consistent and highest paying jobs I’ve had are replacing or fixing legacy and garbage systems. I don’t think the current gen llm’s are anywhere close to being able to do those jobs, and is in fact causing those jobs to have more work the more insecure, inefficient trash they generate.
Give it a few months.
Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I’ve made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:
- email as workflow
- email as version control
- email as project management
- email as literally anything other than email
- excel as an relational database
- excel as project management
- help, our wiki is out of control
- U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
- The CEO’s nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can’t get rid of it
In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we’ll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.
excel as an relational database
That reminds me of a story. I used to do IT consulting, years ago. One client was running their 5 person real estate office off a low quality, consumer grade, box store HP desktop repurposed as a server. All collaboration was through their U drive, plus every profile had their desktop folder redirected there.
The complaint was the classic “everything is slow”, which turned out to be “opening my spreadsheet takes 10 minutes then it’s slow”. Yeah, because that poor little “server” had a single 100 Mb jack and the owner had a 1.5 GB excel spreadsheet project where he was trying to build a relational database and property valuation tool. Six fucking heavily cross referenced tabs, some with thousands of entries. He was so proud when I asked him to explain what was going on there. He fired me when I couldn’t fix his issue without massive changes to either his excel abomination or hardware.
Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn’t even think about “underpowered desktop as company server” as another pattern, but here we are.
Sorry you didn’t get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.
I don’t get how an MDA would translate to “no programmers needed”. Maybe they meant “coders”?
But really, I feel like the people who use this phrase to pitch their product either don’t know how many people actually find it difficult to break down tasks into logical components, such that a computer would be able to use, or they’re lying.Software engineering is a mindset, a way of doing something while thinking forward (and I don’t mean just scalability), at least if you want it done with quality. Today you can’t vibe code but proofs of concept, prototypes that are in no way ready for production.
I don’t see current LLMs overcoming this soon. It appears that they’ve reached their limits without achieving general AI, which is what truly would obsolete programmers, and humans in general.
programmers, and humans in general
With current levels of technology, they would require humans for maintenance.
Not because they don’t have self-replication, because they can just make that if they have a proper intelligence, but because their energy costs are too high and can’t fill AI all the way.
OK, so I didn’t think enough. They might just end up making robots with expert systems, to do the maintenance work which would require not wasting resources on “intelligence”.
