Programming

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.

Man. I so feel this. I'm 51 and started programming when I was 10. It's not anything like it used to be. I miss those days.

I feel like a lot of concepts are being conflated.

Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible.

I disagree with this. The craft is still alive and well, it's just specialized. As complexities in approaches grow, it's not possible for a single person to know every register of every subunit all the way up to high level application software in any reasonable manner. You can totally write your own bootloader for your current hardware. Nothing is stopping you. Is the argument that the financial utility is lowered? Is it that he chose voluntarily to focus on application layer development?

This is like someone who built their own bicycle lamenting they can't do the same for a modern EV.

Wasn't "lo-code" a BIG thing a few years ago... that would destroy programming and make every PM a developer? Whatever happened to that? 🤔

Edit: read the HN comments. If I ever go back to consulting, I'm 10x-ing my rate to work on cleaning up this slop. I'm not anti-AI coding and use it for my own projects, but if you just give it a prompt and walk away, you will be very sad later.

There's a BIG difference between prototypes and something others have to use. As the lo-code folks found out the hard way.

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

I wonder what the venn diagram of people that started coding as kids and people that enjoy vibe coding looks like. Informally, the degens on my squad that started on their parents' computer loathe AI, and the people that stumbled into it in college are all about the vibe code.

I had a realization recently. All the pro-AI people pushing vibe coding or "coding assistants" are completely missing the point.

These tools aren't helping you write code, you are helping the tool write code, because it can't do it on its own yet. The more they improve, the less you're needed.

Idk if they'll ever reach the point where you can actually give it a prompt, and it'll provide a fully functional implementation on its own with no human intervention required. If it does, I can't imagine that tech would be as available as it is now. Your peasant ass isn't going to be vibing the next big thing that's for sure.

Creative constraints bred creativity.

That might explain why there's so much crap coming out of the gaming industry. All the old constraints are gone, so everything now very much looks the same.

Just give yourself artificial constraints.

Just don't use AI coding tools then? Studies show they make people less productive anyways.

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.

Yeah, I noticed something was off around the time every new app was essentially "the fucking website on a self contained chrome browser", aka electron. Sure, it was sold off as being a "write once, run everywhere", but a significant number of said programs and games were still either windows or android exclusive because ha ha fuck you (anyone that's dealt with RPM MV/MZ knows it).

Some layers of abstraction are incredibly welcome - not having to worry about cycles and RAM addressing, having immediate access to graphics without having to reinvent pixel pushing function; but (imo) everything on top of a browser is just an endless series of "why?"

I wish i could have started then! I'm not really interested in modern coding, it doesn't seem as interesting...I kind of want to read the whole c64 manual and try programming on it, but I guess there isn't much point to that nowadays

high level code generating tools have come and mostly gone

we will see if this one is good if it works and we can maintain the code it makes

simple

This isn’t a rant about AI.

I feared thus would be about AI, but... this might actually be interesting! I'm glad I started reading.

This time is different [...] Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that.

Well f*ck you and give me back the time I wasted on that article.

Guys, can we add a rule that all posts that deal with using LLM bots to code must be marked? I am sick of this topic.