[SeekAndFind]

A leading light in this area is Simon Willison, an uber-geek who has been thinking and experimenting with LLMs ever since their appearance, and has become an indispensable guide for informed analysis of the technology. He has been working with AI co-pilots for ever, and his website is a mine of insights on what he has learned on the way. His detailed guide to how he uses LLMs to help him write code should be required reading for anyone seeking to use the technology as a way of augmenting their own capabilities. And he regularly comes up with fresh perspectives on some of the tired tropes that litter the discourse about AI at the moment.

Why is this relevant? Well, by any standards, programming is an elite trade. It is being directly affected by AI, as many other elite professions will be. But will it make programmers redundant? What we are already learning from software co-pilots suggests that the answer is no. It is simply the end of programming as we knew it. As Tim O’Reilly, the veteran observer of the technology industry, puts it, AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. The same is likely to be true of many other elite trades – whether they speak English or not.

[Bob434]

I wonder if ai can create code for folks? Maybe even write programs? Not sure how to word it thouh so the ai would,understand what’s being asked.

[Jonty30]

https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2025/Mar/17/openais-kevin-weil-predicts-end-of-human-coders-says-ai-will-surpass-them-by-year-end

[SpaceBar]

I can hardly wait to get on an airliner made by people like this.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

In five years, most of the new code on the planet will be written by LLMs. There will be few developers - instead we’ll have solution engineers and product managers who specialize in composing prompts. And in 10 years, we won’t even need the solution engineers and product managers. Software development as a human occupation is swiftly going the way of the horse and buggy.

[FrankRizzo890]

I’ve been working on a project with Grok. It’s very complex, and Grok appears to have limited working memory. I have a HUGE prompt that describes the problem in intricate detail. The code generated is ALWAYS missing items described in the prompt. And debugging is painful as it will occasionally just remove big globs for code for no apparent reason. Can it whip out some VBA code to do simple things in Excel? YES! Can it whip out a BASH script to do simple things? YES! But when you get into deep things, it has a problem with those. (Yes, I’ve tried Gemini, chatGPT and CoPilot as well, Grok is the best of the 4)

[ifinnegan]

Interesting.

[rellic]

While I know several programming languages, I also have a Computer science degree, and I know you design software, not just hack away till it works.

[Nachoman]

Good news for future English majors, if true.

[Gene Eric]

>> the hottest new programming language is English

>> [the others are] arcane programming languages

Funny as I often demand an explanation in English.

Nonetheless, interpretations of English constructs will at best produce approximations that would otherwise be implemented in the more precise “arcane” language.

Silly article.

[minnesota_bound]

The code changes for the same request. Still need a human.
I asked GROK to make a simple webpage of top header and bottom footer and left and right column.

I made 2 requests for each line.
I used the same directions below and GROK came up with the same layout but the code was slightly different.

GROK -
1st line: This can best be viewed on a pc and does not collapse into a single column for cell phone. First attempt used vh, px, flex. The second attempt used vh, %, flex.

make a simple webpage with top and bottom div and left and right div

2nd line. This one will create a webpage for pc that can also be viewed on a cell phone.
First attempt used vh, px, flex. The second attempt used vh, %, rem, px, flex

make a simple responsive layout webpage with top and bottom div and left and right div

[PhillyPhreeper]

....and it mostly works.

Nuff said

[Sirius Lee]

I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

Yeah, try "mostly works" with a payroll system.

[mjustice]

I knew the article was going to be trash before I read it - and I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve tried several models and many write poor code - sure, it works, but it doesn’t scale well. The C++ code they churn out is great to illustrate how to solve a problem, but they generally won’t work well (or fast) in complex systems. At this point I would say it works as well as a novice programmer, not quite a junior programmer. Programming by humans isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. AI is a great tool, but it doesn’t have the experience to make larger projects work. I’m not sure you can shove that into a LLM yet.

Putting it in the hands of inexperienced developers is only kicking the can down the road - there’s a guy who built a small SAAS and had to take it down after the code that was written by AI had bugs and security flaws. His story is on X.

[CodeToad]

CASE tools promise. Been hearing it since the 1970’s.

[Degaston]

I use AI tools almost every day to help me write code. Yes it helps me do things much faster. But it does not take away the need to understand all the details End to End and fix bugs when the AI tool gets it wrong.

Its not eliminating programmers. But it is greatly reducing the numbers needed, especially of those who are not versatile and able to pick up new tools quickly.

And software continues to eliminate many more jobs as automati9n & integration is such a game changer in almost all industries.