Well, this kind of AI won’t ever be useful as a programmer. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t reason. It cannot make decisions besides using a ton of computational power and enormous deep neural networks to shit out a series of words that seem like they should follow your prompt. An LLM is just a really, really good next-word guesser.
So when you ask it to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem, great it can do that. Because it saw someone else’s answer. But if you ask it to solve it for a tower than is 20 disks high it will fail because no one ever talks about going that far and it flounders. It’s not actually reasoning to solve the problem - it’s regurgitating answers it has ingested from stolen internet conversations. It’s not even attempting to solve the general case because it’s not trying to solve the problem, it’s responding to your prompt.
That said - an LLM is also great as an interface to allow natural language and code as prompts for other tools. This is where the actually productive advancements will be made. Those tools are garbage today but they’ll certainly improve.
Never have I had to implement any kind of ridiculous algorithm to pass tests with huge amounts of data in the least amount of memory, as the competitive websites show.
It has been mostly about:
Finding the correct library for a job and understanding it well, to prevent footguns and blocking future features
Design patterns for better build times
Making sane UI options and deciding resource alloc/dealloc points that would match user interaction expectations
cmake
But then again, I haven’t worked in FinTech or Big Data companies, neither have I made an SQL server.
It’s not gate keeping it is true. I know devs that say ai tools are useful but all the ones that say it makes them multiples more productive are actually doing negative work because I have to deal with their terrible code they don’t even understand.
I literally don’t write code anymore, I write detailed specs, invest a lot of time into my guardrails and integrations, and review changes from my agents. My code quality has not fallen, in fact we’ve been able to be much more strict about our style guidelines.
My job has changed completely, but the results are the same - simply much, much faster. And to be clear, this is in code bases that are hundreds of thousands of lines deep, across multiple massive monorepos, and using context from several different documentation sites - both internal and external.
If anything, people are understating the effects this will have over the next year, let alone further. The entry-level IC dev is dead. If you aren’t producing at least twice as fast as you used to, you’re going to be left behind. I cannot possibly suggest strongly enough that you start learning how to use it.
The claims that AI will be surpassing humans in programming are pretty ridiculous. But let’s be honest - most programming is rather mundane.
Well, this kind of AI won’t ever be useful as a programmer. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t reason. It cannot make decisions besides using a ton of computational power and enormous deep neural networks to shit out a series of words that seem like they should follow your prompt. An LLM is just a really, really good next-word guesser.
So when you ask it to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem, great it can do that. Because it saw someone else’s answer. But if you ask it to solve it for a tower than is 20 disks high it will fail because no one ever talks about going that far and it flounders. It’s not actually reasoning to solve the problem - it’s regurgitating answers it has ingested from stolen internet conversations. It’s not even attempting to solve the general case because it’s not trying to solve the problem, it’s responding to your prompt.
That said - an LLM is also great as an interface to allow natural language and code as prompts for other tools. This is where the actually productive advancements will be made. Those tools are garbage today but they’ll certainly improve.
It already is.
You mean useful to a programmer, or as useful as a programmer?
Ah - yeah I read that wrong. It’s useful to a programmer.
Never have I had to implement any kind of ridiculous algorithm to pass tests with huge amounts of data in the least amount of memory, as the competitive websites show.
It has been mostly about:
cmakeBut then again, I haven’t worked in FinTech or Big Data companies, neither have I made an SQL server.
Because actually writing code is the least important part of programming.
I mean, not the least important, it is an important part. But way less than a common person thinks.
My productivity has at least tripled since I started using Cursor. People are actually underestimating the effects that AI will have in the industry
It means the AI is very helpful to you. This also means you are as good as 1/3 of an AI in coding skills…
Which is not a great news for you mate.
Ah knock it off. Jesus you sound like people in the '90s mocking “intellisense” in the IDE as somehow making programmers “less real programmers”.
It’s all needless gatekeeping and purity test BS. Use tools that are useful. Don’t worry if it makes you less of a man.
It’s not gate keeping it is true. I know devs that say ai tools are useful but all the ones that say it makes them multiples more productive are actually doing negative work because I have to deal with their terrible code they don’t even understand.
I literally don’t write code anymore, I write detailed specs, invest a lot of time into my guardrails and integrations, and review changes from my agents. My code quality has not fallen, in fact we’ve been able to be much more strict about our style guidelines.
My job has changed completely, but the results are the same - simply much, much faster. And to be clear, this is in code bases that are hundreds of thousands of lines deep, across multiple massive monorepos, and using context from several different documentation sites - both internal and external.
If anything, people are understating the effects this will have over the next year, let alone further. The entry-level IC dev is dead. If you aren’t producing at least twice as fast as you used to, you’re going to be left behind. I cannot possibly suggest strongly enough that you start learning how to use it.
Sure, Jan