AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.
Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.
The amount of code I’ve seen copy-pasted from StackOverflow to do things like “group an array by key XYZ”, “dispatch requests in parallel with limit”, etc. when the dev should’ve known there were libs to help with these common tasks makes me think those devs will just use Copilot instead of SO, and do it way more often.
I think that undersells most of the compelling open source libraries though. The one line or one function open source libraries could be starved, I guess. But entire frameworks are open source. We're not at the point yet where AI can develop software on that scale.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I think I failed to drive my point all the way home because I was typing on my phone.
I’m not worried that libs like left-pad will disappear. My comment that many devs will copy-paste stuff for “group by key” instead of bringing in e.g. lodash was meant to illustrate that devs often fail to find FOSS implementations even when the problem has an unambiguously correct solution with no transitive dependencies.
Frameworks are, of course, the higher-value part of FOSS. But they also require some buy-in, so it’s hard to knock devs for not using them when they could’ve, because sometimes there are completely valid reasons for going without.
But here’s the connection: Frameworks are made of many individual features, but they have some unifying abstractions that are shared across these features. If you treat every problem the way you treat “group by key”, and just copy-paste the SO answer for “How do I cache the result of a GET?” over and over again, you may end up with a decent approximation of those individual features, but you’ll lack any unifying abstraction.
Doing that manually, you’ll quickly find it to be so painful that you can’t help but find a framework to help you (assuming it’s not too late to stop painting yourself into a corner). With AI helping you do this? You could probably get much, much farther in your hideous hoard of ad-hoc solutions without feeling the pain that makes you seek out a framework.
I think there will be (and there already have been) significant downsizing over the next few years as businesses leverage AI to mean the same work can be done by less people paid less.
But the job cannot go away completely yet. It needs supervision by someone that can see the bullshit it often spits out and correct it.
But, if I'm honest, software development seems to be targeted when I think design writers should be equally scared. Well, that is if businesses work out that AI isn't just chatgpt. A GPT or other LLM could be trained on a company's specific designs and documentation, and then yes designers and technical writers could be scaled right back too.
Developers are the target because that's what they see chatgpt doing.
In real terms a lot of the back office jobs and skilled writing and development jobs are on the line here.
The work can’t be done by someone paid less. The work can be done by highly skilled, experienced developers with fewer junior resources. The real death comes 60 years later when there are no more developers because there is no viable path to becoming a senior.
Technical writers you may be correct about because translating text is one is the primary use cases for AI.
Well that’ll be junior developers, until they get hauled over the coals for producing highly repetitive code rather than refactoring out common themes.
I can’t wait for my future coworkers who will be coding with AI without actually understanding the fundamentals of the language they’re coding in. It’s gonna get scary.
I guarantee you have coworkers right now coding without understanding the fundamentals of the language they’re coding in. Reusing code you don’t understand doesn’t change if you stole it from Stack Overflow, or you stole it from Chat-GPT9.
The code on SO is rarely specific to what the use case is IMHO. Any code I’ve gotten from there has had to be reworked to fit into what I’m doing. Plus I can’t post some stuff on SO because of legal reasons but can on an internal ChatGPT portal.
Trust me, it’s gonna get a lot worse.
Matter of fact, I look forward to the security breaches of developers posting company code into ChatGPT for help lol. We already had that issue with idiots posting company code into the public GitHub.
We had an ai demo at work last Friday where we just were showing off a local running llm with some test input. Best part was the demonstrator had it output something unexpected and they were like “I’ve ran this twenty times and it has never said that”. Lol. We’re alright but it’s incredibly useful already it’s pretty exciting.
I would have bought it if they said ifnot instead, it’s the same number of characters and wouldn’t require a major parser overhaul to support keywords with a ’ in the name.
Same here. Sure, KDE and Gnome may have great Wayland support by now, but what about other DEs? The situation in XFCE seems to be pretty grim:
It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).
MATE seems to have piecemeal support. No idea what the status of LXDE/LXQT are. And there are plenty of other window managers that don’t have the manpower to support wayland either.
The deprecation of X is going to leave a lot of dead software in its wake.
Yeah, people like to pretend KDE and Gnome are the only options. I dislike both. Cinnamon is the (unintended?) spiritual successor to the last Gnome I liked, which is Gnome 2.
It’s very much intended. Cinnamon was forked from GNOME 3 when it was released. It was intended to preserve the old GNOME 2 layout, but ended up evolving into the Cinnamon we know today.
While there are not actually any trailing commas in the dictionaries present and you are correct to say the ones present are part of a list, you can also have trailing commas in Python dictionaries. OP might have researched “Python trailing commas” and learned that part.
Trailing commas are fantastic to reduce changed lines in git diffs. Makes life much better. Same thing with leading commas in SQL queries.
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