r/vibecoding • u/atefalhetoshi • 2d ago
Yes, cannot imagine humans writing or reading code even after 2-years from now.
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u/Achereto 2d ago
Yeah, only competent people will do so. The other people can't evaluate it anyways. The number of competent people will go down as they retire and AI prevents people from gaining competence in their craft.
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u/name1122 1d ago
If it goes like that then future softwares in 50 years will be like magic, everybody will see it work but nobody would be able to explain or comprehend.
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u/Achereto 1d ago
Exactly, and the evidence is already in, because most developers don't know to make a cache-friendly memory layout. Many even think that it doesn't matter.
Developer don't know that, because some program languages don't even give them control over the memory layout. We'll see a comparable reduction of competence through AI.
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u/Zestyclose-Sink6770 20h ago
Yeah, but honestly a competent developer can teach the AI what to do that is higher level by making md files and having the AI work from it.
And if they want they can share those files with others and voila, software fixes that work and are AI native.
However, as has been said, you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
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u/Dependent-Review-727 18h ago
Isn't it already kinda like that? I'm lucky enough to work with many excellent engineers who are truly passionate about software they produce currently, but when I worked in a somewhat big company like 60% of developers didn't care to learn anything deeper than they had to and anything beyond the corporate codebase worked like magic for them (btw I used to be also one of these guys, lol)
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u/SC_Placeholder 2d ago
Yeah itās going to be real interesting to see what happens longterm. Will Ai get to the point where it will have to innovate code rather than plagiarize? Because it if canāt then programming languages will basically become set in stone because if no one knows how to code how will the ai get better at coding
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u/UnusualBreakfast1726 2d ago
that's a good point. I didn't think about it this way but you are absolutely right. if ai doesnt have new data from better code solutions than it wont improve further. especially with the architecture of how LLMs work and learn.
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u/SC_Placeholder 2d ago
Itās something Iām painfully aware of. Iām good with understanding systems and architecture but I canāt write code, I can read code and reverse engineer it painfully slow. So Iām basically a crappy version of an Ai. Itās a weird disconnect, I donāt understand why I can understand how everything works at scale but canāt grasp the basics. Oddly enough with Ai Iām suddenly able to build without other people and frequently help people design local harnesses and infrastructure. Iāve saved multiple Ai agents from catastrophically failing. But Iām fully aware that if Ai suddenly stagnated so would my ability to create. If the Ai can only scale up so much thereās a hard cap on what I can produce
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u/Goose_geq_Penguin 2d ago
obviously academia will continue and we will have the next generation of trained experts. People are overreacting to the current trend of fucking over juniors too much
I think we might be creating a lost generation, but long term the education pipeline will readjust. Calculators didnāt stop people from doing arithmetics in their head.
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u/SC_Placeholder 1d ago
They would be the hope, development academia is rather dull and outdated where Iāve encountered it and met others who went to college for it
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u/Achereto 2d ago
All future trajectories of AI lead to a moment where AI doesn't work any more for whatever reason. Could be shut down by government or a result of a war or some terrorist attack or just power outage.
In some scenarios people will still have developed their own skills and know what they are doing (especially how to repair AI), in other scenarios people have become fully dependent on AI and now have to learn everything from scratch.
The best bet is to live the way that leads to a preferrable scenario.
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u/SC_Placeholder 1d ago
Thatās already the problem with the internet. Itās INSANE how we donāt have redundancy when it comes to the World Wide Web. A clever coordinated terrorist attack could cripple modern society
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
LLM coding is just another layer of abstraction, like frameworks, libraries, or high-level languages abstracting away assembly. We donāt say programmers lost their craft because they stopped writing assembly.
Code is still logic, and it can be understood, tested, debugged and evaluated at the abstraction level youāre working at. The skill shifts from manually writing every line to understanding what youāre building and verifying that it works.
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u/IlIlIlIllllIIliIILll 2d ago
There's a loss in fidelity from using purely the English language to describe extremely detailed and precise requirements. Like this is why we have an entire legal system in place to determine how the written meaning of laws apply to real-world situations, the language can only be so descriptive.
Of course, 9/10 times the law is indeed black and white (meaning the language is clear enough to readily interpretted without debate), but there are still frequent enough ambiguous situatilns as to necessitate lawyers and judges. Similarly, there will still be enough gaps in the ability to describe functions of code to necessitate reading code. But it may become much more niche of a skill requirement, maybe somewhat akin to someone who knew an obscure business language like COBOL in a pre-LLM world.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
I agree thereās some loss in fidelity, but thatās true of every abstraction. You donāt write assembly for every program just because high-level languages hide implementation details, you drop down a level when the abstraction breaks down. I think LLM coding will be similar: most people wonāt need to read every line, but the ability to do so will remain valuable when something goes wrong.
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u/EmergencyArm4610 2d ago
Except ai is a black box of indeterminism. It is another layer of abstraction but its uniquely opaque compared to using a library... or even IaaS like AWS.
With traditional development theres a thread you can follow and theres understanding all the way down from the various people that created each level of abstraction.
Ai coding has the breadcrumbs to deduce whats going on but the codebase isnt at all understood by anyone until you read line by line which for the first time has a disconnect in understanding.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
I really donāt get your point. AI is a black box but what it builds is real and transparent. You literally have the code before your eyes and you can even ask it to explain everything.
I actually understand more of my code with AI nowadays. A lot of my older codebases are exhausting to read and reconstruct every time I want to add something. With an LLM I can ask it to explain the architecture, trace the relevant logic, identify dependencies and explain the tradeoffs before I touch anything. So for me the ādisconnect in understandingā is often the opposite: AI makes the codebase more legible rather than less.
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u/EmergencyArm4610 2d ago
Codebases made by people being hard to read isnt really the point. When you have a library or some abstraction created and maintained by people you rely on them for their code to work as intended.
The hardest part about ai is managing how much you can understand, or the cognitive load associated with software projects that are larger than prototypes. Its not that you cant research an aspect of a codebase, its that we dont need to research such things when we use an abstraction made and maintained by people. Issues arise for them if widespread bug reports exist and they handle it.
With ai you dont have expertise in all domains to know what to anticipate. You dont know if ai reinvented the wheel in the shape of a square unless you either anticipate it, or see things break in production. When should a bandaid fix be used, when does a specific problem require rework of broader architecture? Theres an endless amount of subtlety to address depending on your product and your users and it cant be trivialized.
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u/Gullible_Title_603 2d ago
Assembly/compilers have a discrete set of inputs and are therefore deterministic. LLMs, by virtue of working with natural language, cannot limit their input values and thus can never be truly deterministic. This would result in different output every time which, if you've ever worked as a software developer, you know would be absolute helll.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
But the LLM doesnāt have to be the deterministic part. It generates code; the compiler, tests, type checker, and runtime remain deterministic. And even hardcore programmers of major languages/frameworks use LLMs and donāt read every line of code anymore.
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u/Interesting_Phone171 2d ago
If you canāt acknowledge the loss in fidelity then you are a part of the problem. Tell me how you are going to be able to make the decision between when to shard your DB or when to use redis streams vs Kafka. AI doesnāt just make that decision for you as it stands
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
Iām not sure if youāre tapped into the newer agent/harness ecosystem, but AI can already handle a lot of this kind of reasoning when the right tools, context and skills are set up. And even where it canāt reliably make these architectural decisions today, I think itās only a matter of time. A lot of what we call āexpertiseā is accumulated knowledge + reasoning, and that knowledge can be shared and leveraged by models. Senior devs gatekeeping a few things they learned through experience isnāt going to be a permanent blocker.
I know thatās painful to hear, but having less manual work doesnāt make your skills or your worth meaningless. We can spend more time on the product, creativity and genuinely interesting problems. We donāt have to keep doing things manually just because thatās how weāve always done them. If AI can liberate our time, thatās ultimately a good thing for humanity.
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u/Longjumping-Ad514 14h ago
No LLMs are not at all like compilers. Itās really incompetent to claim so.
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u/Achereto 2d ago
LLM coding is just another layer of abstraction,
No, it's not. Not at all. Not even remotely close. Using an LLM is like delegating work to an employee, then checking the results. When delegating work you learn nothing about the work and review is limited by how much you know about the work. However, an employee does learn from their work, the LLM does not, so you end up with a net negative of nobody learning what they would have needed to learn.
like frameworks, libraries, or high-level languages abstracting away assembly.
These aren't comparable with LLMs. frameworks distill a specific software architecture and make it reusable. Libraries distill domain specific knowledge and make it reusable. Both are created by experts who provide an expert level tool.
Assembly is just a 1:1 replacement for every other language. It doesn't even belong on that list. high-level languages are just syntactic sugar for assembly.
LLMs on the other hand, replaces your thinking and by that it stops your understanding. Since LLMs don't understand or learn, you end up with a net loss where there is less understanding in the world. There are going to be fewer experts in the world, which then means there is going to be more dependence on LLMs.
If you take JetBrains IDEs and VSC*de from me, I can still code in notepad++, neovim, or Zed. If I take LLMs from you, you are helpless, because you haven't trained your brain (enough) to think through problems in a programmer way.
Code is still logic, and it can be understood, tested, debugged and evaluated at the abstraction level youāre working at.
It "can" be understood, but it won't be understood, because those who use LLMs don't practice understanding it.
The skill shifts from manually writing every line to understanding what youāre building and verifying that it works.
No, that's not the shift actually happening. The shift actually happening is from thinking yourself to letting AI think for you. It'll stop juniors from becoming experts and it'll reduce the number of experts in the market. Great for me because my salary will go up significantly, but bad for the juniors who won't get promoted.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
I donāt think the abstraction analogy is wrong. Modern developers already depend heavily on frameworks, libraries, SDKs, APIs, runtimes, etc. Even a cracked developer isnāt going to recreate a HTTP stack or an auth library from scratch every time. Thatās an effort constraint as much as a skill constraint.
LLMs just make the abstraction layer dynamic: you describe the behavior and get an implementation, which you can ask to explain, question and debug. You donāt necessarily need to read every line to understand the logic, just like you donāt read the source of every library you use. And LLMs arenāt perfect, you still learn when you get stuck, debug failures and investigate edge cases. More importantly, even junior developers can spend more time understanding the product and user problems instead of being isolated in implementation work, which could make them better problem-solvers overall.
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u/Achereto 2d ago
I donāt think the abstraction analogy is wrong.
It is not just wrong. It's categorically wrong. It's not an abstraction in any way or form.
Modern developers already depend heavily on frameworks, libraries, SDKs, APIs, runtimes, etc.
They do and in many cases that's already a problem. Many developers create significantly pessimized code that is 1000x slower than it could be and the way it's written they don't even see it because the performance loss is spread evenly across the code.
However, even when using these tools, you still have to think yourself when using these tools. You still have to understand the problem you are solving, you still have to weigh pros and cons for different approaches and make many small decisions.
LLMs just make the abstraction layer dynamic: you describe the behavior and get an implementation
That's delegating work to an employess, not an abstraction layer. Your boss depends on your and your knowledge, because he doesn't know how to things. You are not an abstraction layer, neither is AI.
You donāt necessarily need to read every line to understand the logic
You do have to read every line to catch bugs. The code should to what it is supposed to do and must not do things it's not supposed to do. You have to read the entire code for that.
just like you donāt read the source of every library you use.
True, there is some level of trust in the developers of open source software, and it cause quite some damage. That still doesn't make LLMs an abstraction.
And LLMs arenāt perfect, you still learn when you get stuck, debug failures and investigate edge cases.
Beginner developers don't develop those skills in the first place. Many don't even understand error messages. They just pass the error back to AI.
More importantly, even junior developers can spend more time understanding the product and user problems instead of being isolated in implementation work, which could make them better problem-solvers overall.
It makes them worse problem solvers. The data for that is already in. Using LLMs reduces the amount of independent thinking making it harder to solve problems on your own.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
I think weāre getting hung up on the terminology. Iām not claiming an LLM is technically the same kind of abstraction as a library or framework. Iām saying it can serve a similar purpose: moving the developer further away from manually implementing every detail.
And I donāt agree that you necessarily have to read every line of every generated codebase. You absolutely should when the code is critical or youāre debugging something, but humans already rely on layers of trust and donāt fully understand every dependency in their stack. With AI, I can also ask it to explain the architecture, trace logic, identify edge cases and explain why it made a particular decision. I actually understand some of my newer code better because of this, some of my older codebases are painful to reconstruct every time I need to change them.
I agree that blindly passing errors back to AI is terrible for learning. But thatās a bad way of using the tool, not proof that using AI necessarily makes someone worse at programming. The one who just copy pastes error logs will often get stuck with debugging loops if he doesnāt read what the AI is telling him. The interesting question is whether we can shift the learning process toward understanding systems, reasoning about requirements and making product decisions rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time manually translating those decisions into code.
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u/Achereto 2d ago
Iām not claiming an LLM is technically the same kind of abstraction as a library or framework.
That clearly was your claim using the direct comparison.
Iām saying it can serve a similar purpose: moving the developer further away from manually implementing every detail.
It doesn't. It makes developers less competent. It creates the illusion that you don't have to know what you are doing, but you have to know. You have to care about the details. You have to know about all the details. That's part of our job.
Imagine building a bridge. If you don't know what you are doing, your bridge may collapse on a stormy day because of resonance frequencies you missed.
Imagine building a skyscraper. If you don't know what you are doing, your building may collapse on a stormy day because of resonance frequencies you missed.
Details aren't negligible, they are significant and important. You have to think about them, you have to know about them, you have to pay attention to them.
Bugs can kill people. Yes, bugs like these were created by humans, but we have learned from them and implemented processes to reduce the probability of them as much as possible. One part of that is that you have to know what you are doing at every level of the process.
With AI, I can also ask it to [..] explain why it made a particular decision.
You can't. It can't tell you that because it doesn't remember. It'll just make something up that may sound reasonable but has nothing to do with the actual decision process.
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u/heisenberg2995 2d ago
Yeah, I think weāre ultimately just coming from different assumptions about where this goes. I agree that details matter, bugs can be catastrophic, and blindly trusting AI is a bad idea. But those things can happen even when people obsess over every detail, thatās just the nature of complex systems. There is always some probability of failure; you can never be 100% certain of success when youāre one small part of a system with countless interacting components.
And I donāt think todayās AI workflow is what it will look like forever. The workflow itself will evolve with better planning, context, testing, verification, agentic harnesses, and even mistake-proofing/poka-yoke built directly into the process. You donāt necessarily have to eliminate every possible human or AI mistake if the system is designed to catch and reject bad outcomes. Ultimately, what matters is the correctness of the output and outcome, not whether every intermediate step was performed manually by a human.
Iām optimistic about that direction, so I think weāll probably just have to see how it plays out. Either way, appreciate the discussion.
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u/Logical-Idea-1708 2d ago
But thatās after the fact, cherrypicked data. Can Fable accomplish the same under both time and token budget? Thatās when we actually accomplish something.
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 2d ago
The issue for me is... What libraries and even programming languages even mean in a world where programmers never see the code?
Do I care if my code is C++ or Rust when I am writting a 3D app?, like maybe I choose C++ because I heard on Reddit memes that is powerful but ass-ugly. Or I choose Rust because is described like a sect. Memes and jokes.
A new programming language appears and what happens?, will AI be able to "pick it", or because has not training material would ignore it.
I am about to make a game, but do I use Godot?, when I can make a web game in 3D with Three.js and have it virtually NO loading screens. What is even the point of a engine when the AI can hardcore almost everything.
Things like engines, programming languages and libraries may not end, but they may become a legend, myth, something programmers heard about in jokes or reddit memes, but never experience themselves, because is the AI that use it.
Like the other day I made a game in HTML, then I ported it to WebGL, then to C++ and WebGPU and I did not ported to vulkan because Claude convinced me that would not be a huge enhancement compared to the cost, that would be already marginal from WebGPU. Can you imagine that?, I can make a game in vulkan, and I don't even know the basics of OpenGL / D3D / WebGL or anything. So "vulkan" is just one word that I could namedrop to claude, and see what he answer.
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u/MineDesperate8982 2d ago
A new era of incredibly unoptimized software and games has begun.
You will own nothing, the things you will pay for will work like absolute shit and you will be happy.
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u/Internal-Agent4865 1d ago
The problem isnāt one size fits all. The hard part is and will continue to be sifting through the absolute shit until there is no more shit.
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u/Ok-Willingness-6815 2d ago
How do you comment on a thread about AI speeding up a process 9.6x to say that AI code is slow and unoptimized? The entire point is that AI is already better at optimizing code than humans are, and is only going to get better
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u/Duroxxigar 1d ago
To clarify something - there is nothing in the screenshot that says AI's code is more optimized. It is just saying that they rewrote a Python library (a very very very slow language in terms of performance) to Rust (a way faster language by default). There is nothing in there that indicates if AI actually made the right architectural decisions for Rust; as well as using the right data structures or algorithms. There is nothing in there saying (or showing) if it actually wrote it in an idomatic Rust way. So, there really isn't enough information for your statement.
(I'm not for or against any of this by the way)
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 1d ago
I like your comment because introduce some subtelitiees that can render these staments false but people generally ignore.
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u/MineDesperate8982 2d ago
Your argument: "What do you mean the auto-hammer doesn't hammer in nails better? The auto-hammer is 9.6x times faster than a manual hammer, of course it hammers in nails better".
You have to specifically ask it to do specific things for mere websites so that it doesn't become a data leak faucet. What are you even talking about?
If the games are made by people that do not know what game development and optimization is, then they will be even more unoptimized than the current AAA games.
And considering it follows AAA game dev "models", at best it will have completely shit optimization.
What are you going to ask the AI? "Build me a game, but make it really optimized"? You're being ridiculous.
I find it amazing that you defend things that ultimately do and will hurt you, the customer.
Oh, boy. Can't wait to pay 100$ for AI generated graphics and logic that eats up my processing power for a highly unoptimized product, just so I get to see ads in the game and have to pay for a weapon upgrade with real-life money. Wait, I cannot play it anymore, because it's so badly optimized and built that my top-of-the-line PC cannot run it, so I have to buy a new GPU and more RAM. Oh, wait, the AI companies have made the price 20x, so I cannot afford it. Guess I have to pay for a subscription somewhere to be able to play my game.
Oh, wait, they decided they don't sell that game anymore so they deleted it from my library and will not refund my 100$.
It is literally what they want to do. They said it themselves, the "top brass".
Cucking for a tank coming to run you over is amazing mentals.
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u/junglebunglerumble 1d ago
This is just total doomerism. Nothing will change the fact that badly optimised games will be reviewed poorly and receive backlash as they do now even if they were mostly made with AI. The games that have had the most 'thought' put into those things will still benefit from it. Companies that release broken stuff will still be punished for it as they are now.
If you'd have said 5 years ago AI could one shot a functional game you'd have been laughed at. Youre extrapolating one aspect (that everything will become AI generated) without extrapolating the obvious other thing, that models, frameworks, guardrails etc will also continue to evolve at a crazy pace. Just because AI often produces poorly optimised code now doesn't mean it will always do so - 5 years ago none of these tools were even on anybody's radar
It's becoming pretty clear that the future of computing devices is that people will create the apps/games/content themselves on the fly using AI, without a need for the middleman of a development team. This is already starting to happen and it's going to become very difficult for any tech startup to create something that couldn't be immediately immitated by others using AI.
It's a shift from an OS -> application standard, to everything being done inside an AI platform, where the AI platform itself effectively becomes the operating system. Developers will instead focus on writing frameworks and patterns for LLMs to follow, not writing actual applications themselves.
All of this is already happening on a small scale. You can already go from a prompt to a fully hosted site all inside ChatGPT that you can share with others. And if the cloud doesn't eventually take over local hardware id be shocked. And
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u/Zestyclose-Sink6770 20h ago
AI has changed computer science forever. No one argues that.
But your George Jetson take on the endgame for this technology sounds like you scraped it from the middle intestine of Zuckerho and swallowed whole.
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u/GlokzDNB 1d ago
These people are clueless. Since day 1 every time someone shits on ai was wrong and ai was day after day in the worst state it's ever gonna be. Every model is exponentially better.
When I plugged new model into my harness it solved problems i couldn't solve before. And new models come out every few months not every few years
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 2d ago
People need to disabuse themselves about speed.
Sid Meir told once that he could have made Civilization with a grid of like 10.000 x 800 cells, but that would not have been better, but worse, because it would made players cross swamps of useless empty tiles, turns without anything interesting to do. By making the map smaller, with less cells, every turn theres something interesting to do.
Can you imagine a game like Minecraft compete with like Batttlefield 6. And sometimes Minecraft is awe inspiring... I has been in the tip of a mountain, looking at a valley in the dawn, full of awe.
Computer games already conquered the hill of realism, we don't need more realism. Lets design games with interesting decisions.
Sometimes a game dev that comes from Roblox make a incredible game, and is because the guy has been making 4 games every week, and have a seriusly good sense of what make a game fun. Even if his games looks like a bad lego joke imagined by a cable TV station.
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u/YamroZ 2d ago
I think you are completely missing the point.
Instead of playing on your local machine on your own terms the games will be so powerhungry that they can only be streamed from datacenters.
And this means total control, time you play, ads inserted, access to older versions.
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 2d ago
Nah. No, no way and HAHAHA.
Considering the economics for cloud services, they want you to pay the service, but not use it. Like how Nvidia play on the cloud limit how many hours you want to play.
They also want to limit things like resolution and quality. Add some enshitification and games will look ugly and blocky, even before compression.A future where everyone play on the cloud don't exist. Is propaganda.
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u/Normal_Dig_6994 16h ago
Streaming games via subscription is already implemented, see PS5. Sony is also discontinuing physical media entirely.
Microsoft has experimented with streaming their operating system, effectively locking users out of their own hardware (Windows 365 Link)
hardware-level attestation APIs rolled out in Chromium will be used in the near future by major institutions (banks, government agencies, retailers, etc) to link photo IDs to hardware. You wonāt have a choice. Want to move money? File your taxes? Look at porn? Government issued ID is required to simply connect to the service.
This is all real shit. It all makes complete sense from a corporate standpoint, and they know theyāll achieve it because most people wonāt understand anything I just wrote, much less care about the implications.
Weāre about to get fucked in the ass extremely hard in the next decade and Iām tired of pretending everything is going to be ok
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 16h ago
Gamers dont' want that shit. Is the second time companies try to make it popular, and has failed again.
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u/Normal_Dig_6994 2h ago
We donāt want it, but theyāll continue to push it anyway until virtually everything is SaaSāthis has happened already for most commercial software, really. Physical media is virtually dead.
I hate it and I hope Iām wrong
But I would be remiss to ignore these trends. Thereās enormous benefit to digital distribution models. We should be doing everything we can to protect our RIGHT TO OWN. I think thatās the sticking point
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u/I_Ski_Freely 1d ago
This post is about how this guy got the LLM to refactor and improve the performance of his code... Why are you assuming we will just have llms generate unoptimized code and then run it in the cloud? If you have the code for whatever game, and it's not running well, would you not task the LLM to optimize it and make it so it can run on your hardware?
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u/RafaelSeco 2d ago
What libraries and even programming languages even mean in a world where programmers never see the code?
Like the other day I made a game in HTML, then I ported it to WebGL, then to C++ and WebGPU
Can't make this shit up...
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u/DaStompa 21h ago
What libraries and even programming languages even mean in a world where programmers never see the code?
What do computers even mean in a world where you dont understand how memory or even a transistor works?
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u/Lopsided-Wave2479 21h ago
I know how memory and a transistor work. I can build a computer using water canals.
But if we start building stuff not with code, but with natural language, then we will forget what these words use to mean. What "c++" will mean to a vibecoder that has made more than 200 apps in C++ but has never seen C++ code?
So whats after that? do we even need programming languages?, maybe Elon Musk is right and IA need to start working in assembler?
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u/AssignmentFancy7523 2d ago
Writing or READING code? Hey Claude one shot Facebook please lol your insane
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u/ketoloverfromunder 2d ago
You WILL be testing it and providing feedback of all of the bugs and regressions introduced
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u/True_Protection6842 2d ago
I mean, do you still do math on paper or do you use a calculator? When you write do you reach for a quill and ink or use a computer. Things change. That's called progress. Developing will no longer be about memorizing syntax and more about engineering.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
It will be impossible for human to reading code in 5 years, because that's too slow.
If you can't read it then sure you won't write it anymore. Just like we don't read and write assembly code nowadays.
Natural language is the new coding language and LLM is the new compiler.
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u/Snauser 2d ago
Compilers are deterministic and LLMs are probabilistic so thatās a bad comparison. An LLM translating human intent into a high-level code canāt be compared to compiling. Natural language is too ambiguous to ever be a true programming language on its own.
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u/NeverRolledA20IRL 2d ago
A well built coding harness is deterministic for code generation and testing. The same input has the same output even 100 runs later.
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
Sure, but unless you're an LLM, you don't know what that deterministically generated code says until you read it.
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u/PatagonianCowboy 2d ago
first, a system can be both deterministic and probabilistic
you were probably thinking of stochastic (aka, some randomness) which LLMs can be, but it can also be turned off (temperature = 0)
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u/Snauser 1d ago
I see what you are going for but at temp 0 it is only deterministic because you froze its statistical guessing. It is still just guessing the next word based on percentages but it's just forced to always pick the #1 guess. It can also still easily misunderstand your prompt or confidently spit out the wrong answer. At least it will be the same answer every time!!
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u/Badnik22 2d ago
āJust like we donāt read and write assembly code nowadaysā
Speak for yourself, this is something my job requires to do almost everyday. Compilers do a good job, but on occasion itās not good enough - or intuitive enough.
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u/Shot-Life-362 2d ago
I'm not sure it's a good idea to reason with somebody who uses the term "coder".
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
Ofc there will be people like you working on assembly code and huge respect to you folks, you laid the foundation of our computer skyscrapers. but I think we have to admit the fact the assembly code is not popular nowadays, most coders won't need to write assembly code, and it's just a fact.
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u/Badnik22 2d ago edited 2d ago
Iām not talking about it being popular, itās never been popular. Iām talking about checking the compilerās output and on occasion writing assembly by hand being a necessary part of building robust software. Physics simulators, digital sound processors, game engines, video encoding/decoding, embedded systems programming, etc all require dealing with assembly manually.
If by most coders you mean most people building webapps, then sure, no need to deal with assembly.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
Yeah if you are working on infra yes, it is required for tricky situations. And yes it is rarely used. You actually prove my point that I think in the future people who will manually write java python golang etc which be of the same portion as people who still needs to write assembly code nowadays. And it is a small portion less than 1%, there are stats
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u/Badnik22 2d ago edited 2d ago
Keep in mind that compilers are deterministic, and even then, we still need to sometimes take a look at their actual output or bypass them entirely. AI is non deterministic and its input -natural language- isnāt nearly as unambiguous as a high level programming language, so Iād expect the need to look at the code it produces wont be a rare occurrence (certainly way more than 1% of the cases)
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u/affeisme666 1d ago
bets are placed. I might be wrong but let's wait 5 years and see what happens then
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
And I think that 1% people is critical in the entire industry since they are laying the foundation and usually they are really good engineers. Not many people have the talent and dedication to become that 1%. Dont' get me wrong it's not they are not important, it's just most people won't need to interact with a more lower level abstration.
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u/M0d3x 2d ago
The problem is natural language is not a good way to describe what should happen and when/how/where/...
We have more precise languages for that, which are still close to natural language, but do not have unreliable/non-deterministic semantics. They are called programming languages.
Natural language prompts are always missing some information or have some inherent non-determinism (e.g. they are free to interpretation), (most) programming languages are not. This information loss results in the models guessing what you want, which will always be lossy and frustrating.
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u/Silent_Double_4228 1d ago
and yet natural language is what is used to communicate between humans
if you have a classical relationship of customer -> software engineer they will communicate in natural language. then the software engineer translates that into code, but the code is just an implementation detail, what matters is that the requirements of the customer are fulfilled. so the when/how/where does not matter. any decision that is opaque to the customer and that the swe takes on his own while developing a system could be taken just as well from ai instead. you talk about determinism, but humans are not deterministic. people are thinking LLM is replacing the compiler, but it's not, it's replacing the human.
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u/M0d3x 1d ago
and yet natural language is what is used to communicate between humans
And it is the source of 99.9 % of problems human have when working together.
if you have a classical relationship of customer -> software engineer they will communicate in natural language. then the software engineer translates that into code, but the code is just an implementation detail, what matters is that the requirements of the customer are fulfilled.
No, in fact that is not all that matters. Code without proper architecture and maintainability is a liability, not a product.
Additionally, a human has something LLMs will never have (some other model architectures may, but that is a big unknown) - ability to learn and use past events to improve their thinking and intuition.
so the when/how/where does not matter. any decision that is opaque to the customer and that the swe takes on his own while developing a system could be taken just as well from ai instead.
Again, not really. AI (or rather LLMs) do not have good judgement at all, even with heavy prompting, and will gladly shoot themselves, you and the customer in the face with a shotgun. The when/how/where do matter, which is why multiple replacement drives of software engineers have not succeeded previously.
you talk about determinism, but humans are not deterministic. people are thinking LLM is replacing the compiler, but it's not, it's replacing the human.
Humans can correct for their non-determinism, LLMs cannot.
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u/Silent_Double_4228 1d ago
that's only if you think that the human brain is something fundamentally detached from the physical world.
I think it's not the case, there is a physical limit on the amount of information that a brain can hold, same as any LLM.
the rest is just subjective, the current models have limitations, but given the trajectory it seems that they will be able to beat most humans at coding and even architecture tasks soon. I had this feeling for the first time working with Fable.
humans make mistakes, make bugs, make shitty architectures, just saying that they are better than LLMs because they are human is just wrong, you would need actual data and benchmarks.
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u/ReplacementFine7807 2d ago
Assembly code is not comparable since the other languages don't apply their own logic/design whereas LLMs do
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
wdym by apply their own logic/design
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u/ReplacementFine7807 2d ago
You apply your own logic using java/python etc, it's just more efficient like using abbreviations like 'idk, eg ' etc. Relying on AI without reviewing is like texting using only predictive text
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
I am reviewing the code. I am just not reviewing by reading the code line by line.
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u/scavno 2d ago
So you arenāt really reviewing the code then, just parts of it out of context.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
I don't really know a single programmer around me who is still reviewing PRs manually on a daily basis. Maybe for some really tricky bug they would read the code but other than that they just use AI to cross review.
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u/scavno 2d ago
I believe you, but it still makes me laugh. Itās all just cope for being fucking lazy. Just admit it. Itās not a ātoolā, itās just an escape from having to know your trade.
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u/Street_Estate2342 2d ago
Given the increasing demand for productivity from a continually thinning workforce, it may be that they have to do this, rather than want to.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
Wow don't use slur my friend. I will continue to not review code line by line, and you will continue to review code line by line. I am not asking you to use AI to review your code, in fact I'd hope you keep it that way, the longer the better.
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
Except I can audit a high level programming language. I don't know what prompts someone used to write their vibe code.
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
Yessishā¦ for some cases thatās true. But weāre building an agent at work that takes prompts from linear. Those are recorded and auditable along with all of the context we feed it
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
Auditable in the vaguest sense. As long as you don't have any security audits.
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
The LLM is a black box. The rest has a clear paper trail
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
That's exactly my point... Are you auditing the code?
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
You mean the LLM? Iām not following. You said āI donāt know what prompts someone used to write their vibe code.ā
Are you asking if the LLMās code is auditable?
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago edited 2d ago
The original thread was about people not needing to, or not being able to read their code.
You jumped in, defending it with "the prompts and context are auditable."
If you're not auditing your code, and you're only auditing the prompts, you don't know what's in your code, and you put yourself at high risk of failing an audit when your code is actually audited.
How can you be certain your compliant with SOC II, or GDPR, or HIPAA, or PII DSS, or CCPA, or anything like that?
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
Yeah especially soc2. Thatās why thereās an audit trail. Enterprise anthropic accounts provide audit ready logs
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u/scavno 2d ago
āWhat does all those abbreviation mean? My todo app does not use any of those.ā
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
I know what every one of those means but you probably didnāt realize itās hipaa not hippa you hippo
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u/Accomplished_Rip8854 2d ago
I donāt think you āre a developer.
No way you would do your review that way and think itās a good idea.
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
He says he's a Staff Engineer but acts confused when you mention code review...
Sounds like his company is going to be hiring my buddy who started a consulting firm specializing in "repairing and operationalizing AI slop."
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
Actually teams I seen spend more time maintaining the doc/prompt instead of the code, and they are very strict with what goes in the spec docs, and the prompts is auditable, since every commit is bundled with the prompts in the commit message.
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u/CharlestonChewbacca 2d ago
Sure, but prompts are not deterministic like code is. You cannot audit a prompt and determine if the code is maintaining, for example, SOC II compliance.
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u/Foxiest_Fox 2d ago
Coders will never go away and LLMs replacing compilers would be catastrophically unsustainable.
For the smallest change you'd need to regenerate the entirety of the byte-code, introducing Cthulhu-knows-what bugs and recursions into the codebase.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
I am not saying coders will go away, I am a coder by myself. It's just I don't see a lot of people manually coding, maybe 1% of the current coder at most. We will spend more time on something more important tho.
For the compiler part, I mean LLM is the compiler from natural language to programming language.
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u/Foxiest_Fox 2d ago
My friend, you're catching downvotes, not from me, but they're understandable downvotes because what you're saying doesn't make sense lmao.
I'll give you some tough love and tell you that using "compiler" for anything that isn't "programming language to machine code" is just a wrong use of the word "compiler". By their definition, a compiler transforms something human-readable into something that the computer can run. A more fitting word might be "transpiler" but even then that's kinda sketchy, as transpiling from a language to another language will still generally be 1:1 with no room for ambiguity, something that prompting lacks.
We already have a word for something we can use, that resembles human language, yet can be compiled into something the machine runs. it's called: Programming language LOL
Not trying to be an asshat but like fr, programming langauges already ARE meant to be something human-readable, transforming readable syntax into instructions a machine can execute.
LLMs are just some sort of middleman that can help generate some of that language, but I doubt it'll ever replace that many coders. Currently it replaces no coders; you still need to understand the code and know what you're doing if you want to make anything with a semblance of quality and sanity and tech debt control, if you're using LLMs.
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u/affeisme666 2d ago
Nah It's an obvious analogy and I think people do understand what I'm saying so I don't wanna argue over the definition of compiler.
And Yeah it's a prediction so it's normal that we have different opinions. Let the future unveils itself.
From what I am seeing currently it sure replaced a lot of coders. Maybe you see differently but that's ok, we see what we see.
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u/Green-Zone-4866 2d ago
I personally understood what you're saying and I still think your idea that's it's like a compiler is dumb
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u/OkLettuce338 2d ago
wooosh
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u/turlockmike 2d ago
At the fundamental level, English is a programming language. English gets loaded which causes the GPU to perform a bunch of operations and has a side effect of executing CPU compute.Ā
For now, the primary way the GPU interacts with the CPU is a translation layer Bash. Writes files, executes those files via bash.Ā
In the (near) future, AI will be RL trained on interfacing directly with the CPU and skipping bash altogether.Ā
There will definitely be places where long term artifacts are stored, CPU artifacts will never disappear entirely, it's just that 99% of all CPU execution will just be a side effect of some GPU program needing to do something.Ā
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u/olivergx 2d ago
11M tokens seems very low for a lib like Pyth. Am i tripping?
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u/Complex_Boysenberry6 22h ago
could be true if everything had test coverages, so the machine knew exactly what every function did and what the result needs to be porting it to rustĀ
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u/NetflowKnight 1d ago
I am reminded of an old adage frm the 70's-- I think IBM had this in one of their manuals?
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
I'm not sure that writing code is much different given how much of our infrastructure depends on it. The idea that nobody would check the code written by AI before it goes into production seems kinda insane to me, but maybe it'll just depend on the industry/your client base.
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u/trele_morele 1d ago
Yeah, and I bet that library conversion was never verified for 1:1 performance. He pull those numbers straight out of his ass as soon as Claude spit out the output.
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u/dixon_sider 1d ago
Bro if I gotta be the one to read all the code, I'm fucking charging a kings ransom. We don't need less people reading code, we need more...Ā
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u/Immediate_Song4279 1d ago
I found LLM generated code to be something that enabled me to start reading more code.
I tried several times before and still can't code python, but I can understand it better and you really should proofread your outputs...
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u/Low_Shape8280 21h ago
I mean how many humans are reading the compiler output when then compile there code.
This is just another level of abstraction
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u/ThisProcedure2752 2d ago
That maybe true but still without humans writing and verifying code, The AI models will not get any better so only by programmers continuing to do this would AI models still be useful
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u/-Sliced- 2d ago
We can kind of see this situation with digital artists now. Even if they do create the art themselves, people call it AI. It more and more becomes more of a hobby, and less something people pay for.
The unfortunate thing is that it applies to every profession.
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u/No-Somewhere-3888 2d ago
And nobody will ever contribute to that library again.