The End of Programming

broodbucket

Really didn't see programming going the way of blacksmithing in my lifetime, let alone early in my lifetime.

cafebabbe

I don't know if this is the end of programming, but i can clearly observe the gradual end of expertise in my company - people slowly forgetting architecture, principles, and how stuff works in general, in favor of code delivery speed. And without expertise you end up asking stupid things to a token producer machine, however godlike it can be. It's hard not to extrapolate...

staszewski

Controversial title just to stir the engagement. Congrats, you're on top of HN!

piker

Nope. Not yet. The frontier still produces slop and never refactors. Your code base will grow with the square of your features and grind to a halt. God speed to folks that work at this shop.

chrisjj

Clickbait title for a story about a bot translating a program from one language to another. Some people get hyped over the most trivial things.

simonw

This is a strong article with a distracting headline. Challenge for commenters: can you discuss the content without getting caught up in the headline? My favorite paragraph: > The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works. For me, this captures what's special about the Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol class of models. If you can reduce a problem to a clearly verifiable end state, provide the necessary context, and equip a model with the necessary tools it can usually get to a good solution. Reducing problems to that state and designing that environment remains a skill, and one that I expect we will be paid handsomely for.

mpweiher

From TFA: "What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction." “Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1] And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding. [1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...

thomas-skowron

Considering the direction that InfluxDB has taken over the years, making insanely terrible product and tech decisions, chasing shiny new things, breaking the Open Source edition further and further while not being able to offer a competent sales process for the commercial one, I think it's fair to take the opinions of the author with a mountain of salt.

the-smug-one

The main reason that I'm in the process of switching jobs is to get more money, in case we are fucked as a profession later on. So yeah, even if I don't necessarily believe this is the future, I am certainly making sure that if it is the future I will be more comfortable.

nasretdinov

LLMs are scarily good at translation, whether between natural or between programming languages. Also very good at re-implementing the stuff that has been provably done before. And, arguably, 90-95% of writing code is exactly that.

ironbound

The Bun from Zig into Rust move is at best doing a "burn out on the main street" Loud with lots of smoke, but didn't go anywhere!

znnajdla

The article gives the example of Bun's successful Zig to Rust of why this is the end of programming. I think that rewrite is a perfect example of why it's NOT the end of software engineering. A non-programmer could not have prompted AI to do that rewrite, and in fact a non-programmer would not have even conceived of the idea of doing that rewrite in the first place. Somebody is still needed to 1. come up with the idea that a Zig-to-Rust rewrite is necessary to achieve certain technical goals 2. prompt the AI to do the rewrite, clearly describing the before-and-after architecture, the goal of the rewrite, and technically verifying the result. Neither 1 nor 2 can be done by someone who doesn't even know what Bun, Zig, or Rust is, let alone deeply understand how those work. In fact, even I as a programmer with decades of experience in PHP/Python/JS but without specific experience in Zig and Rust probably couldn't do a proper rewrite for a project the size of Bun.

AJRF

Such a big disconnect in the coverage of coding models and the output they produce. If you discard coding purity questions like style, architecture, cleanliness - the stuff they come out with is buggy & error prone. The problems seems architectural - in that context windows are limited and you need more compute to increase them, married with the fact the models are really over confident. But if you do increase them it causes mode collapse. Yann LeCun has a really good graphic in his slides of a circle (all possible answers) and a red line coming from the centre depicting the one correct path. How do you actually stop the model going into the subsequence of wrong paths? I don't think it's possible. I've had so many times in my day job someone has told me (Claude told them) there is a bug in my code, I look at it and nope - it just didn't look up the right file. Then you push back on it and it completely crumbles and says sorry. I wouldn't keep an employee hired who did that over and over again and never learned

Gareth321

I agree with the thesis. Development is moving towards intent and alignment and clear understanding of needs. These have always been important but in a future where code is almost free, customers will be more demanding about having their needs met, fast. Our SaaS company is making plans to move towards bespoke development, which until now has been far too costly for most customers to accept. It also violates the multi-tenant cost/business model, so we're scrambling to figure out what hosting and ops and support agreements look like in a bespoke future. The implications here go well beyond development. I'm seeing pretty massive changes happening in finance, consulting, HR, accounting, law, design, architecture, health, and everything else. When the value of intelligence is effectively zero, how are humans supposed to market and sell themselves in the job market? Some white collar people might try to move into physical jobs for job security, but it will only take a fraction of white collar workers to migrate to crater wages there too. We're not ready for this. Socially, economically, and politically. Look at how we treated middle Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs when they were offshored to China. Hillary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." We'll watch jobs and industries disappear while clinging to our own and praying that it's not us today. UBI is going to be inevitable soon, but it's also woefully insufficient. Giving a developer who used to earn $100k $20k per year UBI isn't going to placate their white hot rage at the social contract being broken. We're going to need universal high income, and paying for that is going to be such a radical social change that I worry voters won't accept it until things are dire.

rfgplk

The end of programming and the birth of metaprogramming. The art of writing programs that write programs, which itself is significantly harder than writing programs themselves. In fact I'm glad to see this happening because at most shops the use of metaprogramming is minimal to non-existant. (see Linux/Chromium/Firefox/Android)

przemub

I think the best glimpse into the future is the bugginess and engineering laziness of Claude Code itself. New versions ship daily and I seem to hit brand new issues every day. They disappear after a few more updates, but it's damn annoying to keep up instead of doing work, and the direction of changes is lacking at best. The underlying technology otherwise seems nothing short of a miracle, but the contrast is eye-opening. In industries where this is acceptable, that's the future. In ones that can't tolerate it, it isn't. I hadn't expected software engineering itself to be one of the former but it's kinda obvious in retrospective.

mikasisiki

I think I’m on the right track by building a feature flag service for AI coding agents. It will serve coding agents rather than human users.

hresvelgr

LLMs will accelerate the proliferation and searchability of ideas. Many times I've been using an LLM and it'll suggest ideas I would have never come across naturally that have been beneficial to whatever I happened to be implementing. For learning in general, it's been the most delightful tool I've ever used. On the other hand, if you're working in an industry where you and your coworkers are developing novel solutions that aren't widely known, chances are you'll still be doing that by hand with some light LLM automation. There are industries with a lot of gatekept secrets where LLMs will be less useful. What I will say on that matter is this: if you weren't surprised frontier labs stole copyrighted work for training data, you'd do well to mind what you push through their systems.

lewistaariq

In our shop, we are understanding that the art of "designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages" (Source: wikipedia) shifted to LLMs does not mean that programming has ended, but that expectations around what and how humans do programming has changed and will continue to change. We still need humans who understand how databases should work and should be designed/evolved because these humans are the consumers of the programs. The prompters (programmers) are the consumers. LLMs are not consumers. Without programmers, LLMs don't do any work.

DrBazza

It's just another tool. Programming is/can be fun. People still hand turn wood, and make their own furniture, even though Ikea exists. Or maybe 'code' just gets pushed down a level like assembly did when C was invented, for example. As a percentage very few people look at assembly in comparison to the 1960s-80s.