I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now and the Thing I Loved Has Changed (www.jamesdrandall.com)
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 10 Feb 20:10
https://programming.dev/post/45560352

cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/917810

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codeinabox@programming.dev on 10 Feb 20:19 next collapse

This quote on the abstraction tower really stood out for me:

I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.

But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.

The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack. AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain.

Feyd@programming.dev on 10 Feb 20:49 next collapse

LLMs don’t add an abstraction layer. You can’t competently produce software without understanding what they’re outputting.

mesamunefire@piefed.social on 10 Feb 21:07 collapse

I mean you can …but its gonna be slop.

MNByChoice@midwest.social on 10 Feb 23:02 collapse

One can get paid and advance through a career producing slop.

Good engineering is hard, and lots of that no longer happens.

rimu@piefed.social on 10 Feb 22:53 collapse

Notice the heavy use of the em-dash throughout that post?

Feyd@programming.dev on 10 Feb 20:44 collapse

I say that knowing how often those words have been wrong throughout history.

Yup

Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this.

A swing and a miss

OpenStars@piefed.social on 10 Feb 21:41 collapse

Technically it would have been true, it’s just that A"I” does not deliver on that promise.