It's simply hard for me to accept that so many presumably sharp software developers see a synth-playing robot using violin samples up on a stage (coding agents) and think welp, that's the end of violinists. 🙃
Dude, just because you've figured out a way to approximate and automate a *snapshot in time* of a body of real creative work **doesn't mean it replaces the traditions & culture of real creative work.**
This fact feels like it would be completely obvious. But, apparently, it's not. 😭
@jaredwhite I've been very confused that the very group in a position to recognize that autocomplete isn't innovative not only fails to understand, but pushes the opposite narrative.
Is it just their (our?) love of tech solutions? Are they biased by the prospect of avoiding drudgery? I want great results with minimal effort too, but I can't ignore the costs nor the issues of the fundamental approach.
But apparently this makes me weird among the former weirdos.
@swiftone It's the mistaken belief that "code exist to make computer go beep boop" and that's the only purpose of code, and thus the only purposes of coders is to type the code that make computer go beep boop. So then if computer can "write its own code" to make itself go beep boop, success!
That was never the point of code. Code is a language of ideas intended for humans. The ability of a computer to "understand it" and perform a task is a side-effect.
@jaredwhite I teach my students my list of fundamentals, and #1 is "Programming is Communication" (for humans), so full agreement.
Even so, why are so many techies imagining that LLMs will just "get better" enough to overcome the lack of understanding when it comes to maintaining code? We should be able, en masse, to assess technical capabilities.
I don't want a future career of cleaning up slop (or teaching how to) in an ecological and economic hellscape, but that the path we are forging.
Or put another way:
There is no future where coding agents can exist apart from the traditions & culture of handcrafted programming. If you somehow Thanos-snapped handcrafted code away today and forevermore, coding agents would fall apart and disintegrate very quickly.
And if I have to explain to you why that is because you're somehow confused, YOU HAVE BEEN PLAYED.
@jaredwhite When I'm feeling charitable, I kind of think of them as a yet higher level language tier.
We still have assembly programming happening at the same time as we have Python and Blockly.
You still have to know what you're doing with Python to make it work well but without knowing asm there are some problems you won't tackle.
@gooba42 Well I just don't accept that analogy. A higher-level programming language would be another formal rules-based *programming language*, not fuzzy English prompts which trigger an Internet-sized training dataset to remix other people's appropriated code into a new configuration of code snippets.
@jaredwhite Getting decent results from it is, despite the marketing, largely about formally constructed language.
It's closer to natural language but it's far more likely to totally fly off the rails if you're not being careful and structured.
@jaredwhite Every time I see someone say, "I'm so productive, Claude took this spec, wrote up an implementation, examples, docs." and get a little envious, I remind myself: That person now has a huge blob of code they don't understand and is based on a spec they probably don't understand either.
I also think about how I'm working on a game right now and there's no way any agent is going to put together a system of code like I have that is usable and expandable and, most important, one *I* know.
