If AI Writes All the Code, What Do the Programmers Do?

madikz

Edge cases you never think to test: that's where AI output breaks. I deal with this daily in document processing.

madikz

Interesting question. I work on AI for document processing, and I have found the same dynamic: generating a first pass is easy, but the real engineering goes into the verification layer.

jleyank

Debugging. Lots of debugging. It will be interesting when the researchers look back in 5-10 years to determine which was easier/better - trying to understand generated code vs generating code one understands. If a functional reasoning layer is added to the current lookup level, “do you want fries with that?” might be in their “doing”. If this doesn’t appear in a timely fashion, de-slopping code will be their lot.

sdevonoes

Compilers also write code (they write machine code based on high level langs)… yet nobody asked the same question about them (or did they?) AI needs to be instructed and then some kind of verification of the output is needed. Programmers do that

sturza

Design. And redesign.

QuantumNoodle

It really depends on th SDLC of the codebase. I've sat in the park with a pad and pen and wrote down ideas for a small-ish utility that had both a DB and some low level systems interaction. I designed all the interfaces, control flow, and user facing ui. A decade ago I was designing class diagrams with public and private methods, then coding it up. Today I can articulate it with loose words and have it come to life. The secrete ingredient here is... Im an experienced programmer, I know what to ask and what to look out for. I know sockets and how devices work under the hood and which knobs are available for me to turn. Juniors just don't have enough experience. The question should really be "what do inspiring programmers do?"

whytevuhuni

Probably dance.

win311fwg

Same as before? A fancy compiler that is able to accept code written in natural language still requires a programmer to write the source code.

vivzkestrel

- in about 5 yrs of time, this is not going to age well - massive studies ll come out on how 50% of the software engineers dont know or understand what they "generated" at all and how their critical thinking skills have taken a nosedive - every major software company out there that is busy firing juniors now is going to run into the opposite problem: finding talented juniors and they ll command a hefty pay - the whole LLM premise runs on one little assumption that they ll improve indefinitely. you are forgetting the law of diminishing returns - i ll come back here in 5 yrs, this whole thing wont end well

erelong

Programmers collect visions to express in natural language, then loop attempts to express the vision until it is actualized

invalidOrTaken

I have people skills! What the hell is wrong with you people?

jmcqk6

There are three things programmers bring: Salience - Agents only know what we bring to their attention Judgment - Agents cannot make decisions in the larger business context Responsibility - Agents do not care if they crash the system