- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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(let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)
Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 “Prompt engineer” courses are totally useless in 2025.
Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you’re not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don’t require any proficiency. It “just works”.
Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.
Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.
It’s also a damn useful skill whether you’re working with AI or humans. Probably worth investing some effort into that regardless of what the future holds.
Though it’s more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.
it’s funny, but also holy moly do I not trust a “sign in with github” button
Might I ask why? There are some pages where I see that as the least evil option, I.e. duckdns
Basically because my Github account has an important job, and I don’t want to increase its attack surface by using it as a pseudo-Facebook
I left 10 years ago, web development is shit.
I can see this partly being true in that it’ll be part of a dev’s toolkit. The devs at my previous job loved using it to do busy work coding.
“busy work coding” is that what you do when you try to look like you’re working (like a real dev)?
We’re using it for closing security flaws identified by another tool. It’s boring, unchallenging work that is nonetheless still important. It’s also repetitive and uncreative enough that I’m comfortable having a machine do it.
There’s still human review but when it’s stuff like “your error messages should escape variables” or “write a longer function name” having a tool that can do most of the grunt work is valuable.
Real world development isn’t creating exciting apps all the time, it’s writing the same exact boring convention based code sticking to an established pattern.
It can be really boring and unchallenging to create your millionth respiratory, or you can prompt your ide to create a new repo and with one sentence it will create stub out 10 minutes worth of tedious prep work. It makes programming fun again.
In one prompt, it can look at my finished code and stub out half decent documentation that otherwise wouldn’t have been completed at. It does hallucinate sometimes, or it completely misunderstands the code, so you have to correct a few sentences, but the brain drain of coming to with the sentence structure to write useful documentation is completely lifted, and the code is now well documented.
AI programming is more than just vibe coding, and it’s way more useful than everyone here insists it’s not.
Feels like you should have automated it if you do it over and over.
I agree that it will continue to be a useful tool. I’ve gotten a similar productivity boost using AI auto-complete as I did from regular auto-complete. It’s also pretty good at identifiying potential uses with code, again, a similar productivity boost as a good linter. The chatbot does make a good sounding board, especially when you don’t remember the name of the concept you are trying to implement or need to pro-con two solutions and you can’t find articles about it.
But all these claims of 10x improvements in development speed are horse shit. Yeah, you might be able to shit out a 5-10,000 LOC tutorial app in an hour or two with prompt engineering, but try implementing a feature in a 100,000 LOC codebase and it promptly shits the bed: hallucinating internal frameworks, microservices, ignoring internal practices, writing straight up non-functional code, etc. I’d you spend enough time prompting it, you can eventually massage the solution you need out of it; problem is, it took longer to do that than writing the damn thing yourself.
Oh god the hate in this sub. It is definitely another tool for a dev to use. Like autocomplete or a lot of other stuff a good IDE does to help you. If you don’t want to use it, fine. Perhaps you’re such a pro that you don’t need anything but a text editor. If you’re not, and you’re ignoring it for whatever petty reasons, you’ll probably fall behind all the devs who learned how to use it to get more productive (or, in developer terms, lazier)
Agreed. Like it or not, old school auto complete was the same thing, just not as advanced. That being said, comment op probably didn’t click the link.
Thanks for summing it up so succinctly. As an aging dev, I’ve seen quite a lot of tech come and go. I wish more people interested in technology would spend more time learning the basics and the history of things.
What a glorious site. I wish every webpage looked something like this
I’m skeptical of author’s credibility and vision of the future, if he has not even reached blink tag technology in his progress.
<blink>How dare they!</blink>
The future of web development is Angelfire.
I don’t remember progressive web apps having anywhere near the level of fanfare as the other things on this list, and as someone that has built several pwas I feel their usefulness is undervalued.
More apps in the app store should be pwas instead.
Otherwise this list is great and I love it.
Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.
Non of those examples are relevant.
Those examples are specific tools or specific implementation pattern, AI in development is a tool.
It doesn’t dictate how to write software or what the written code will look like, it’s a tool that speeds up your code wiring. It catches typos and silly bugs that take hours to debug, it’s able to generate useful unit tests, it can clean up and apply my code style way better than codemaid or resharper ever code, it’s taken care of so much tedious shit and made software development fun again.
Vibe coding is not the future of development. If you aren’t learning to use AI as a tool in development, you are going to be left behind.
It’s more apt to compare it to IDEs. Sure, you can still write you entire app in vim and compile it in the terminal, but you would have been very foolish to deny the future of development was in IDEs.
Pretty much everyone I work with uses vim, emacs, sublime, or vscode. I like IDEs and use them for… well Java, but I wouldn’t argue that they’ve made the other tools obsolete or you’re a fool for sticking with the old ones. If it ain’t broke and all that. It actually seems like more people are moving back to pluggable text editors over IDEs
I’ve used AI tools a bit. They’ve really helped drop in code that would previously just be a bunch of TODOs; they get you up and writing the core parts much faster to see if the idea even works. They’ve also really helped answer specific questions or lead me towards the answer. They’ve also straight up lied to me quite a bit. It’s a weird tool.
I think the OP image is pretty wrong with the comparison it makes. LLMs/AI are a class of technology that are most definitely not going anywhere unless something dramatic happens. Some people, myself included, feel uneasy about the way they’re created and the fact that people in powerful positions completely misunderstand them, and I think that leads to the hope that they’re just a fad.
You’re describing exactly how all these web tools worked. “HTML, CSS, and JS are too hard to do manually. Here’s a shiny new tool that abstracts all that away and lets you get right to making your site!” Except they all added additional headaches, security concerns, and failed to fill in edge cases, so you still need to know how to do all that HTML, CSS, and JS anyway. That’s exactly how LLM generated code works now. It’ll be useful and common for a while and then the technical debt will pile up and pile up and eventually everyone will look around and think “what the hell were we thinking” and tear it all down.
None of those examples are relevant.
They seem pretty relevant. Those things didn’t go away, but they also didn’t remove the need for programmers (the way their sales people said they would).
It is always hilarious and strange to see the buy-in on these things. We have a single coder in his late 60s that has bought in hard to spicy autocorrect. Meanwhile, the youngest on our team (like 22) won’t touch it with a 10 ft pole.
The other issue is just the morality of it. Do I know people that got rich on Bitcoin? Yes. Do I feel like they’re participating in a pyramid scheme still? Also yes. And with spicy autocorrect, where they got their training data for any and all of these models is so freaking morally bankrupt, and they’re desperate to paper over that and make it “ok” for businesses to use it.
As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.
You should click the link.
Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂
Yeah but it’s different this time!
I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.
Quality work will always need human craftsmanship
I’d wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)
It’s tricky, because there’s no hard definition for what it means to “change the world”, either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn’t possible before, and is also reliably useful.
To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn’t really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn’t seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.
These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it’s infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.
Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.
It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it’s doing, then figure out how it’s doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.
I think AI will definitively have an impact in how shit is done, but propably not the way AI bros think. It might not revolutionize the world, but become and standard.
I don’t know enough about AI or about the entire IT world so I cannot 100% affirm or deny anything, though.
I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history,
Cool thought experiment.
Comparing the first iPhone with the release of BlockChain is a pretty solid way to consider the differences.
We all knew that modern phones were going to be huge. We didn’t need tech bros to tell us to trust them about it. The usefulness was obvious.
After I got my first iPhone, I learned a new thing I could do with it - by word-of-mouth - pretty much every week for the first year.
Even so, Google supposedly under-estimated the demand for the first Android phones by almost a factor of 10x.
BlockChain works fine, but it’s not changing my daily routine every week.
AI is somewhere in between. I do frequently learn something new and cool that AI can do for me, from a peer. It’s not as impactful as my first pocket computer phone, but it’s still useful.
Even with the iPhone release, I was told “learn iPhone programming or I won’t have a job.” I actually did not learn iPhone programming, and I do still have a job. But I did need to learn some things about making code run on phones.
I’d love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech
I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?
/edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.
I’m surprised there’s not low-code/no-code in that list.
“We’re gonna make a fully functioning e-commerce website with only this WYSIWYG site builder. See? No need to hire any devs!”
Several months later…
“Well that was a complete waste of time.”
You’re right. It belongs on the list.
I was told several times that my programming career was ending, when the first low-code/no-code platforms released.
At my work we explored a low-code platform. It was not low on code at all. Beyond the simplest demos you had to code everything in javascript, but in a convoluted, intransparend, undocumented environment with a horrendous editing UI. Of course their marketing was something different than that.
That was not the early days of low-code mind you. It was rather recently; maybe three or four years ago.
Once both major world militaries and hobbists are using it, it’s jover. You can’t close Pandora’s Box. Whatever you want to call the current versions of “AI”, it’s only going to get better. Short of major world catastrophes, I expect it to drive not only technological advances but also energy/efficiency advances as well. The big internet conglomerates are already integrating it into search, and I fully expect within the next 5 years to have search transformed into an assistant-like chatbot (or something thereof).
I think it’s shortsighted not to see the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.
I don’t expect it to happen overnight. I’m not expecting iRobot or Android levels of consciousness any time soon, but the world is progressing toward the automation of many things - driven by Capital(ism) - which is powerful in itself.
energy/efficiency advances
the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.
We call this Wikipedia, please consider donating to keep it running!
I completely agree about supporting Wikipedia. I actually do donate to Wikipedia via subscription and recommend others do as well. Being able to just download Wikipedia is also just such a boon. That being said, Wikipedia is just that, a pedia, like an encyclopedia. It’s static knowledge. It can’t rephrase things or simplify them or provide more context than it already has. A phonebook to a phonecall.
I would love to see a breakthrough in energy solutions for high-processing, but I doubt I will in my lifetime, and am pessimistic about such advances even being possible.
It pains me so much when I see my colleagues pay OpenAI to do programming assignments… they see it is faster to ask gpt, than learn it properly. Sadly, I can say nothing to them, or I would risk worsening relations with them.
You should probably click the link
I’m glad they do. This is going to generate so much work opportunities to undo their messes.
Except that they are research students in PhD course, it would exacerbate code messiness in research paper codebases.
Or open source projects…
What the fuck is Silverlight
Microsoft Flash. Netflix used it for a while. I don’t remember anything else using it.
EA Tiburon in Orlando used flash for a while to do the menus in Madden and other sports games.
The League of Legends launcher used it at one point. Not sure if it still does.
I was going to say there’s no way they still are since Silverlight was discontinued by Microsoft in 2013, but it is Riot Games so ¯\(ツ)/¯
A bunch of Disney movie sites did for a while, back in the day when every movie had it’s own website with trailers, promo, and a link to buy tickets and/or the DVD release.
Ahh good times
Be glad, you never had to interact with that ‘technology’. I once did at an internship in 2016.
No one can predict the future. One way or the other.
The best way to not be let behind is to be flexible about whatever may come.
Can’t predict the future, but I can see the past. Specifically the part of the past that used standards based implementations and boring technology. Love that I can pull up html with elements using ALL CAPs and table aligned content. It looks like a hot mess but it still works, even on mobile. Plain text keeps trucking along. Sqlite will outlive me. Exciting things are exciting but the world is made of boring.
I love this
