lobsters score: 1 · tags: vibecoding
The way I look at is: the job was to solve problems, and the way we solved problems was by working on little logic puzzles. Well, the logic puzzles are going away (sort of), which might feel a bit sad, but they were never the point of the job.
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What do you tell people for whom the little logical puzzles were the entire reason to get into this field? It is (or, was?) a large part of the job, after all!
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I really disagree, programming is not dead. Far from it, we need skilled practitioners and designers now more than ever. I discussed this detail in The Decoherence Trap, which was trending for a minute there, but another (quicker) thing I’d recommend reading is my AI usage policy’s section on coding.
In short, if you don’t aggressively create and maintain solid, well thought out abstraction layers that are human driven, and only use AI at the edges, you’re going to find yourself in sleep walking into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later. We already struggled with decoherence and code maintainability prior to AI, and AI is only accelerating it.
I say this as an early adopter, having seen every strategy and idea play out. There simply is no way to prevent decoherence, and the faster and harder you push AI, the more decoherence it adds.
Anyways, take heart, there’s going to be plenty of slop for us to clean up for a very long time.
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This might be a tangent to the main conversation, but I was wondering about your AI usage policy where you write:
As a coder, I do not think there is any ethical issue with using AI to write code (outside of environmental and societal impacts, see below)
Where do you stand on the licensing concerns of LLM output? I’m thinking specifically about papers like https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3 that conclude:
Using LiCoEval, we evaluate 14 popular LLMs, finding that even top-performing LLMs produce a non-negligible proportion (0.88% to 2.01%) of code strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations. Notably, most LLMs fail to provide accurate license information, particularly for code under copyleft licenses.
From your other views, I feel like you probably think this is unethical, but it’s not clear from that line I quoted in your AI usage policy. Maybe you have an interesting take?
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Ah, that is a good point, I will update to include a note on this.
I do believe that violating copyleft licenses is unethical, and non attribution is problematic. However, I also don’t believe in copyleft licenses (or any other forms of IP) as a general good structure. IP has been IMO a major source of decoherence in the economy writ large, and it’s one of the main issues that I will be tackling in the upcoming essay on Open Capital.
That said, it is unethical to not follow the structures a creator decides to impose on their work, and I believe it is neutral to choose a restrictive license (it’s not a right or wrong thing, as much as a right or left thing). I’m more so speaking at the macro level of economic outcomes, and the unintentional structures that restrictive licenses reinforce and validate.
(And to be clear, closed source systems are orders of magnitude worse and the real problem, IMO. Copyleft is just one attempt to break them open, and it doesn’t work)
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My problem is, if programmers and mathematicians are not safe, who is? No knowledge worker, I’m guessing. With typed languages and LLMs that drive them, most things can be automated away, it seems.
I’m annoyed and worried about the future of employment, in general, not just for programmers and mathematicians. I don’t know what comes next.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? Any advice towards people who are seeking employment for the first time in their life? Where to go?
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I continue to hold on to my belief that programmers and mathematicians are safe.
What’s a non-mathematician even meant to do with this navier-stokes.pdf?
Likewise, a non-programmer might be able to prompt some software into existence, but that’s miles away from being able that software in front of actual paying customers, successfully manage it, scale it, and fix it when it goes wrong.
We’ve had almost a year of pure vibe coders building software now. I’m seeing plenty of examples of people building personal software for themselves, but precious few of a pure vibe coder deploying software to customers without it turning into a disaster.
What I’m seeing instead is experienced programmers becoming enormously more effective, because their expertise now takes them so much further.
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What I’m seeing instead is experienced programmers becoming enormously more effective
Experienced ones, yes. I’ve not seen a company hiring juniors in years. Expectations for the future from recent graduates seems to at an all time low.
That can definitely mean death as new people don’t get in.
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It’s completely ridiculous - it’s certain death for the industry. In the meantime the actual experienced engineers will be able to command even larger salaries, as long as they’re willing to put up with having to babysit LLMs and spend the rest of their days reviewing slop. I can only see more experienced engineers like myself leaving in disgust (I would if I had no mortgage and dependents), and no new people getting trained to replace them.
At least those of us who have already “arrived” (in terms of knowledge and experience actually writing software) will be able to coast and reap the benefits.
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I think the best way to make sure young, ambitious people will try to replace you, is to crowd them out and undermine their careers :)
In the mean time, those of us who think our “experience” will shield us from market realities, should try to read Marko Terviö’s writing on “uncertain superstars”: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/oldfichiers051211/enseig/ecoineg/EcoIneg_fichiers/TervioRES2009.pdf
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The strongest positive sign I’ve seen on the junior programmer front was last year when both Cloudflare and Shopify increased their intern hiring (to over 1,000 each) because they saw interns becoming valuably productive in much less time then previously.
At the same time though job opportunities for juniors are clearly down. It’s also not clear if those companies (and other similar sized organizations) are going to stick with increased intern programs.
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