u/mpersico

Tennessee Whiskey. Chris Stapleton.

Amen! Last update at my shop broke all the links. Are they really using actual object ids in urls?

Don’t knock it until you try it. These things still have to be directed and directed well. Requires someone who understands the limitations, and therefore knows how “talk” do things properly to make sure they don’t go off the rails or hallucinate. I know it’s not what we signed up for but if you’re really good at breaking down a system logically, it’s a valuable skill to have.

This is true and it’s a point that I keep forgetting. That is the major argument against the assembly-> compiler comparison. I’ll have to think about that more. I should say the code -> AI shift is similar in scope to the assembly-> compiler shift, not an exact match.

Software engineers will continue to exist. But they won’t be writing code. Therefore they won’t be writing software. They will be system engineers.

Moving from code to AI is the same functional move as from assembly to compilers. That move expanded by far the number of people who could be involved in the industry. We are effectively moving to “programming “in natural language. There will be people who are good at it, and there will be people that make a mess of it. The same attributes that make good programmers will make good AI-ers, whatever we call them.

The ability to break down a request into smaller actionable pieces
The ability to understand how to put existing pieces together instead of duplicating effort
The ability to reason about what’s wrong with a system and fix it, or direct the AI to fix it.

Less typing. More thinking. And quite frankly, we might even end up not using a keyboard at all. I know I would rather talk than type.

Side Note: Confluence? My condolences. Why can we all just use markdown?

It is a huge change. Unlike most changes in the last 40 years, which I like to characterize as horizontal, integrating changes, this is a vertical paradigm change.

By horizontal, I mean changing the way we do things. We move from spaghetti code to having procedures to having modules, object orientation, functional programming. But we were still writing code.

We moved from command lines to guis. We were still writing code.

We moved from servers to distributed systems and back multiple times. We were still writing code.

This is different. We are now no longer writing code. We are writing at a different abstraction level.

Moving from writing code to feeding specifications into AI to generate code is the same abstraction change as when we went from writing assembly to feeding instructions to compilers.

The first compilers were crude. A good team of assembly writers could easily write more efficient code than a compiler. But the compilers eventually caught up.

Today, you have to review every line of code that comes out of Claude, et al. Eventually we won’t.

What that means is you no longer have to know a programming language to build computer systems. The era of the language programmer will be dead just as the era of the assembly programmer is dead.

You going to see a shift toward writing specifications, design, logic. The industry will be opened up to more people which means that salaries will be less. I have no idea what happens to the balance of labor between, say, the United States and India. The US does a lot of outsourcing of coding to India because it’s cheaper. If you no longer need that many coders, maybe that whole economic line collapses.

I’m 60 and a half years old. I am about to retire. I can learn this stuff almost as a hobby to entertain myself and maybe support myself in the years I have left. If I’m in my 20s, getting out of university, I have enough time to retool and I’m not so entrenched in the status quo so as to make retooling onerous.

It’s the people in the middle I worry about. 30, 40, 50. Those folks are going to have to retool or be swept aside.

The ironic part is, we did this to ourselves. It’s almost as if the workers in the steel mills and the auto plants that got fired in the 70s actually built the machines that took their jobs.

We did what every good manager is supposed to do: train the next level of talent to take over for them, so they could move up.

And that is what we’re doing. We’re moving up in the chain. We are finally going to reach the point where we are using natural language to write systems.

This may be an old apocryphal tale but I’ve heard of an ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

Today, the computer software industry is definitely very interesting.

Grep foo *.txt | sed ‘s/bazbug/yadayada/g | sort -u > all.csv

Did you say something about “articulated language”?

🤣🤣🤣

Water. Fine.

Dunkin coffee. Eh.

Vodka martini. That takes nerve. I’d listen to you. 🤣

My attention has nothing to do with links in incoming mail. Doesn’t matter how long you keep mail, a bad link is clicked on usually when the email is. Retention is about liability. You have to keep a certain amount in certain industries, but you don’t want to keep more than you need, so some lawyer can pull a case out of a hat by doing a discovery on emails

Well it’s 10:02 on the US East Coast. What happened?

AI is the new compiler. Code is the new assembly.

Better answer than mine.

You have a thumb. How hard is it to scroll past after you read the first sentence.

I think people will still prefer constant systems as opposed to just asking the AI because they crave organization. But it may be a series of AI agents that you always ask the same questions to that get fed the same data instead of having a spreadsheet, you’ll have a set of financial agents specifically tuned to deal with finances from your company.

I am glad that I am 60 and nearing the end as opposed to getting into the business because the business of programming as coding is really going to go away. I’ve said in many places for the past few months, based on my beginnings of using AI to code this change is different than anything we’ve seen in the last 40 years. Everything we’ve seen so far has been what I like to call horizontal spread. We went from index files to databases to caches. We went from spaghetti code to procedural code to object oriented code to functional code. Those are different techniques using the same skill programming.

AI is different. It’s a different set of techniques. And it’s a step in the vertical abstraction direction. The step from coding to using AI is the equivalent of going from assembly to compilers. And right now we’re at the beginning when the first compilers are coming out and you had to check the assembly to make sure it did the right thing. Eventually, I don’t know if we’ll check the “assembly”, aka code, anymore.

Your first assignment after accepting will be to document everything you do, and then they’ll fire you. And now you’ve got to search for a new job again. Do not accept. Move on.

Dewey

Or even worse, the downtime between Claude sessions on this personal project was such that Claude thinks you need deadlines. 🤣

You were probably better off with the deadlines. Otherwise, your personal project may just drift.

In addition, I would normally say to contact the maintainer if there are problems. But this seems to be a platform issue, and there's no guarantee that the maintainer has your platform. You're going to have to do a little legwork yourself. It would be nice if there were a lot more of us interested, but the truth is that Pearl has seen shrinkage in its user base. That requires a little more work from each of us. Unfortunate, but that's the way it is.

Open source is typically created, updated, and fixed by the people whose itch it scratches. There’s no general maintainer for everything CPAN. It’s really a bit of a DIY situation. Download it, try and install it, see if you can fix it. If you can’t, come back here with error messages and we’ll be more than happy to help you.

We’re not supposed to be binarians in now. Maybe we won’t put code in later. We’ll put the prompts in

Who says it’s not gonna come to that?

I’ll bet the same arguments were being bandied around 50,60 years ago, just

s/code/assembly/
s/ai/compilers/