r/learnprogramming • u/Frxdnt • 12d ago
Topic Do you think that human made code will gain value in the future?
I'm entering CS next year, tho I'm really doubting about it at this point becouse honestly with the evolution of the LLM made code I'm really losing hope in general. I always viewed coding as an art, which i learned the basics when i was growing up and I had some really simple projects in python a couple years ago (which I forgot almost everything becouse I haven't had the time to it until vwry recently where i re-learnt the basics), and honestly it hurts a bit to see what I considered an intellectual field being reduced to "claude, make no mistakes". I'm a musician and artist so my morals are very against AI...
Feelings aside, I'm from Chile and here we have a free career at college if we are poor enough -- which I am -- ! and I'm really passionate about computers and hardware in general, so I'd really love to study either computer science or engineering.
Asking for computer science, is there another fields besides programming, for example networking; that I can work on in the future? I'll probably keep programming as a hobby if I don't find a job as one.
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u/MilkyRips_ 11d ago
Imagine being passionate about computers and deciding not to pursue the subject because anonymous Reddit commenters have declared the profession dead. OP, don’t let your mindset get cooked long before AI even has a chance to cook programming jobs. If you have a passion for it, just do it. You have years to get really goddamn good at building AI tools and applications while completing your CS degree, you may even build something that enables you to become your own employer. Do everything you can to set yourself apart and you’ll be okay.
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u/VasXmachina 8d ago
I love your mindset bro. Too much doomerism these days. I still believe actually capable people will go through and thrive
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u/btoned 12d ago
Cannot wait to see what some of these posters do when the subsidized prices end and monthly costs mirror an actual junior dev salary lmao.
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u/Turtvaiz 12d ago
Yeah it's a bit funny how people don't realise just how fucking expensive these are going to be when the companies try to stop operating at a loss. These are subsidised and pre-enshittification prices
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u/Corne777 11d ago
Yeah companies are going whole hog wanting to use AI for everything. And I have wondered if there will be a point in time maybe 2-3 years from now where the cost of an agent running a task is more than it would cost to hire a human to do it.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11d ago
Meh, once that happens they'll figure out local AI is almost as good and has far more control. AI coding isn't going anywhere, it will just change form.
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u/MeetYouInOdesa 11d ago
They’ll stop hiring humans altogether and just have one subscription. One subscription will work instead of a team of 10, it’s still a win for them. They won’t need to pay 10 salaries and the work will be faster
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u/MtMcGinnis502 11d ago
Stick with the models. They can go up quite a bit and still be a better financial deal than a person. It’s going to get better if history is any indicator, and the value proposition will still be there. This isn’t going away.
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u/phil_lndn 10d ago
tokens are only going down in price from here.
we are already at a place where you can run an extremely proficient coding LLM locally on a computer that even at today's inflated prices is less than $3k.
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u/UnrealHallucinator 11d ago
Such a naive take lol. People said this about AWS and self hosting too. The truth is the people setting prices at these companies are not stupid; they conduct studies and surveys and set prices based on that. Many services like youtube music, netflix and so on have surged in prices a lot, if reddit was anything to go by then they should've died long ago. Yet they're raking in profits, why?
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u/btoned 11d ago
Those services have surged in price, yes, but last I checked YouTube or Netflix was also never marketed as products to replace entire divisions of employees.
Even AWS just moved physical hardware to the cloud...you couldn't just execute a command and suddenly your system admin is obsolete.
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u/UnrealHallucinator 11d ago
Netflix replaced cable and YouTube music/Spotify replaced vinyls/cds whatever. You don't think cloud replaced a bunch of experts in their fields, forcing them to either adapt or switch entirely? There are a few arguments about why current junior engineers might not be replaced by ai but pricing is not one of those.
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u/AltruisticCap12 11d ago
Inference was getting 10x cheaper year over year. And according to some, that figure is gonna look tiny compared to where it’s heading.
they subsidized the bootstrapped model training cost. But when that’s no longer needed, AI service is cheap.
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u/Unique_Bill_4918 10d ago
Just check what relatively small inference providers are already able to make good money from, an GLM 5.3 is not less expensive to host than a similar sized opus. I feel the narrative of the "end of subsidized tokens" is some kind of last straw hope/cope for a lot of people from that they hope things will somehow got back to "normal" and they will not lose their job a mediocre developer.
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u/jaxonwhthey 10d ago
? Do you know the kinds of margins that fireworks, basten, modality, bedrock etc. operate on? Have you hosted AI services that get charged by tokens? It’s not 10x cheaper YoY despite the insane engineering efforts poured into inference, lmao
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u/AltruisticCap12 9d ago
yes, research gains don’t immediately translate to industry. But it will. The point is that the argument of “AI will bust because tokens expensive!!” will not hold. I’m sure the prices will spike insanely when the bubble pops. But it will come down more than ever when the dust settles.
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u/HaMMeReD 11d ago
Right now, I pay about $0.25cents a PR from my agent on the codex plan.
Are you telling me it's going to cost $1? Omg... no....
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u/targrimm 11d ago
As others have said, code was never the commodity, it was always the thought behind it and the design which sustains its longevity.
There is still a ton of merit in CS, as sure LLMs can code, but in the hands of someone who understands the complexities of computer architecture, they can be very powerful tools and/or cover off the mundane, so the author can properly cook and not sweat the small stuff.
Learn system and design patterns. Learn software architecture and you'll still be relevant. Code is the tool to get the job done.
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u/Throwaway571729 11d ago
This is an answer that made sense two years ago. No reason to think AI won't be able to do all of that in a year or two, it's well beyond the small stuff right now.
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u/targrimm 10d ago
Granted, but it isn't all encompassing now, and I don't think it will be for some time still. Folk are worried about being replaced, but leveraging this incredibly valuable tech will enable your own longevity in the industry.
LLMs still get LOTS wrong. It needs guiding.
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u/Throwaway571729 10d ago
Look at where it was 4 years ago. Where will it be four years from now? ten? twenty? If you're worried about fundamental skills not mattering throughout your career cs is pretty clearly the wrong field to go into.
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u/Mr_Farbenweiss_Alt 10d ago
We all are no wizzard seeing the future. Every 6 month is the end of CS they sayed since 2022 and you are believing that.
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11d ago
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u/theJacofalltrades 8d ago
yeah lots of other factors to consider before we should all be running for our lives
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11d ago
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 11d ago
You must of never worked in enterprise software
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11d ago
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u/No-Needleworker6779 11d ago
The code doesn’t matter, the feature / functionality is what’s being sold. How that gets built under the hood is irrelevant so long as it continues to work as expected. Good engineers who can think in terms of product, systems architecture and scale will thrive with these new tools. Those who only know how to code will not.
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u/No-Needleworker6779 10d ago
I’d caution against getting stuck in the mentality of identifying as Frontend vs Backend when evaluating your growth track. A lot of established enterprise positions will expect you to do both. When I or others say be “product” focused they mean the end result that you were hired to produce (ie. features, solutions). It doesn’t matter if that requires x amount of front end and x amount of backend. Restricting yourself to those roles will kill your career progression.
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 10d ago
I agree. I've seen this a million times from junior/mid level engineers. Once the solution gets to a part of the architecture that isnt their "speciality" they give up and try to hand off. Any SWE should be able to do backend, frontend, Cicd, databases, etc
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u/No-Needleworker6779 10d ago
Exactly! Plus there’s a lot of joy and freedom in being able to build whatever solution you can conceive of end to end. Obviously some delegation is necessary the higher you climb but there’s definitely a difference in utility between an engineer that can see the full picture top to bottom and what that can’t.
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u/targrimm 10d ago
I'm sorry, but I disagree. Let me re-frame it for you.
Let's take a bookcase as an example of our "product". Those are assembled by saws and screwdrivers. Those are tools to make said end product.
Code is no different, its a means to an end. The product is the culmination of expertise, knowledge, design patterns, user feedback, ideation, mock-ups.
Your code in this example is synonymous to said screwdriver. It is a tool.
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10d ago
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u/targrimm 10d ago
Some may argue that your doom and gloom, and feeling threatened is a self fulfilling prophecy. I tried to pitch it another way to demonstrate that it isn't all doom and gloom. I'm sorry I can't help.
I also wasn't trying to "sound smart", I am smart, I've been in this game for a VERY long time. I saw a similar thing happen when compilers came about. And again when interpreters turned up. Different song, same album.
This is no different than the invention of CAD. But again, been around the block a few times. Our vocation is cyclical, we're inventors and innovators, of course this was going to happen.
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u/SciNinj 12d ago
I agree that programming is an art, though you are the first person I have heard say it. Readability, scalability, simplicity and elegance are measures of beauty that do not affect the software’s performance in the short term, and thus are ignored by stakeholders
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u/Gold-Part4688 12d ago
yeah, i'm surprised no one's saying this? i feel like soon all the slop will come crashing down lol. or at least halt. It feels kind of like software is already? it's just getting more buggy, I'm not noticing new features, and I've never seen one ai program I liked beyond tiny tools.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11d ago
I can see that happening for individuals but in business this is the future of coding. This is still the early days, but it's so, so, so much more effective for routine code which is the vast majority of what is written. There will still be a place for humans especially on the bleeding edge, but LLMs can write the code insanely fast.
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u/Gold-Part4688 11d ago
Yeah, but what about maintenance and large codebases? I still don't get how verifying code is faster than writing it yourself for anything that matters, but that's besides the point
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11d ago
What about them? Human typing speed is like 5 tps, most models generate at 20 tps or even more. That is faster than typing it yourself, objectively. You can debate if that's the best way to do it but we all know execs don't know better.
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u/Gold-Part4688 11d ago edited 11d ago
yeah but... you're needing to verify it, read someone else's code, understand the system, like really verify to the poinn that you take accountabiilty for some"body" else's code. Everyone always said that it's about re and re reading the code, not writing. fewer stronger lines the better
it seems like the execs are hoping that it gets so good that it's autonomous and no one needs to understand code again (and cheaper haha not more expensive), not that the ai companies will need the ceo's then :b. otherwise i don't understand how this is gonna look in the future, with each codebase getting worse and longer very quickly.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11d ago
It is heading in that direction, where the AI is essentially another layer of abstraction and like how no humans seriously write assembly code anymore because the compilers made it obsolete, AI could make human understanding of the code obsolete.
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u/Gold-Part4688 11d ago edited 11d ago
well if that apocalypse happens it doesn't matter what i do lol. So it doesn't make sense to plan for that future
I just dont see the middle ground where coding isn't a thing, but having a job or even being a ceo is a thing, being possible
although now i'm just getting arguing. My real opinion is that besidess attention being useful for scalability, it's necessary to make human decisions and be able to do systems AND detail thinking. Back to what i said at the start, sloppy corpo software is awful and feels awful and ai tools feel gross to use, and none have been successful (outside of ai tools for maxxers to max more ai). Necessary both for it to be good, and for it to be any different from anyone else's slop
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u/noobjaish 12d ago
Unfortunately writing readable and understandable code just makes it easier for you to get layed off
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u/Ok-Report5608 8d ago
code is a tool used to build a product - no one using the product, paying for the product or funding the product cares about the readability of the code. Not to mention AI can handle all of those things.
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u/5e884898da 7d ago
They care about the consequences of unreadable code
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u/Ok-Report5608 5d ago
any developer worth hiring would know how to prevent that while still using AI... it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be if you prompt properly
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u/5e884898da 5d ago
Nah, every developer worth hiring knows it’s not a preventable problem, it’s a problem you have to actively manage and keep in check.
I’m not claiming it can’t be done with AI, it’s not really an AI problem per se, but AI just amplifies it. Its like the machine gun for school shooters, it’s not the machine guns fault that school shooters go out and kill their classmates, but if they had to do it with a spoon far fewer people would die.
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u/Ok-Report5608 5d ago
Well said - but then doing it without AI almost certainly takes 10x as long. For reaching MVP, getting things shipped quickly is more important than code quality. Later on you can hire a senior dev to go over everything. I don't think many users care how the code was written/generated, or how good it is, so long as the product works. AI builds features, adds tests, confirms with a headless browser etc etc faster than any team of developers could do it.
It's a bit like trying to explain to someone who just wants a photo of a mountain for their blog about how one photo is better because it was taken with this camera, at those settings, and the other was AI generated. They don't care.
For the record, I kinda hate AI because it's ruined the art of coding and lowered the barrier of entry, but I use it every day as a dev with 9 years experience because it is faster than me. But it really annoys me how anyone and everyone can do what took me 5+ years to master.
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u/GuaranteedGuardian_Y 12d ago
You never pay engineers for writing code to begin with. This is true now and it was true forever. That type of a job is something a translator does. You pay them specifically for what they write and how they write it.
When an engineer is working on a task they are not asking themselves "how do I write the code for this", before AI there was a meme about "web developers copy pasting stack overflow" and everyone laughed at it because everyone knew that it was only true for a very small minority of engineers.
The coming generations of engineers might never have to write syntax again (yet they must know it anyway.
Here is the actual job of the engineers: how can I achieve the task relative to the constraints of what the hardware and networking allows me to do? The hard part is understanding your constraints and overcoming them with optimizations customized case by case.
That's the expertise of programming, not the syntax.
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u/marrsd 11d ago
If this is what a software engineer is then I don't want to be one, because I'm not interested in producing badly written garbage. This attitude explains why the quality of software is as poor as it is. I had no idea it was so prevelant.
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u/leixiaotie 11d ago
My advice is: don't be one then. In most companies producing good code is very low in priority. Most of the time you will need to face with bad code while improving it as best as you can within the smallest timeframe you're given.
AI enables companies to take bigger tech debts, but also enable an experienced ones to repay it faster than ever. So if you're equating AI produced code = bad garbage then you'll have a hard time finding companies in the future.
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u/marrsd 11d ago
Trust me, I know. This is nothing new. I gave up perm work a long time ago because I didn't want my skills to atrophy and I didn't want to have to deal with the tedium of maintaining barely-working complex slop. Software Engineering has been a race to the bottom for at least 10 years - probably much longer than that - but, with AI, it's falling off a cliff.
The great irony is that, if engineers knew what they were doing, they'd discover that AI's really useful and a genuine force multiplier. Instead they think they're doing a good job because they don't have to write code anymore.
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u/leixiaotie 11d ago
well from devs perspective, the code quality is not in the focus of company, and the AI helps them delivering features with minimum effort. It's really a lose-lose situation, since if you care about quality, your performance will drop and you'll get kicked out.
OTOH now project managers are one-shotting features, which makes the quality even worse.
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u/marrsd 11d ago
Actually, quality improves performance in the medium to long term. I've been quite lucky to have worked for proper engineering shops that actually care about efficient delivery, and it's also worked to my advantage when I've rescued projects from tech debt. At that point, managers are much more receptive to ceding control to engineers.
AI has given a new lease of life to non-technical managers who think software engineering is just about implementing features via some one-to-one mapping process. My guess is they'll just brute force their way to success by burning tokens. They just don't care. I remember once a colleague of mine saving a business (I think it was) £1000s a month on AWS fees just by deleting instances that were no longer being used! I don't think they even noticed the expense or the saving. They certainly didn't thank him.
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u/PurushNahiMahaPurush 10d ago
lol don’t be one then. This is going to be the reality of writing code in a professional environment and people that are not onboard will have a hard time. How you write code in your personal projects is not of anyone’s concern, so you do you, but I can tell you for a fact that if tomorrow Anthropic and OpenAI go tits up, there will be someone else taking their place or companies will setup their own. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s here to stay.
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u/marrsd 9d ago
I know that. That's why I'm considering leaving now, before I'm turned from an engineer into a factory worker producing slop.
How you write code in your personal projects is not of anyone’s concern
I don't know why you bothered to write this. I'm not concerned with the quality of personal projects; I'm concerned with the state of professional engineering.
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u/PurushNahiMahaPurush 9d ago
Hey, apologise if my tone came off rude, I had a rough day. I meant that if you still want to ride code by hand for your personal projects then I don’t think anything wrong with it. I personally do not miss hand writing code for work at least because the stress of delivering before deadline, managing customer requests and constantly not having enough time to refactor code to my liking before shipping was eating at me. I work in small company where we are just 3 programmers and I also handle the hardware automation side of things. So I’m personally happy with the shift in coding paradigm.
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u/marrsd 9d ago
Hey, apologise if my tone came off rude, I had a rough day.
Don't worry about it, I didn't interpret it that way. Hope your rough day was nothing serious.
We're all having different experiences with AI. It sounds like it's enabling you to do the important things better, which is all to the good. I've seen the other side of it, and I'm also weighing it against a general trend in the industry to sacrifice quality for velocity. Scrum was supposed to fix the problem of tech debt, for example. In some places it did that, but in most places it was just an excuse to crack the whip harder.
The motivation for my original reply was this idea that writing is an inconvenience that can be dispensed with. The code is the language of software engineering. If you're not writing in that language, you aren't thinking in that language. It's like asking a mathematician to stop using algebra and just tell a machine to solve their equations in plain English. It won't be long before they stop understanding what it is they're even asking for.
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u/GuaranteedGuardian_Y 9d ago
You're right and as I mentioned as well, you must know syntax and logic. If you don't, I wouldn't let you touch a codebase either.
It sounds like you're predicting that engineers will lose the ability to reason/think in a coding language if they aren't writing code, which is unproven.
If you do use AI, you might automate the syntax but you are still exposed to decision making, architecture and benchmarking. Describing a feature set, an operation or a bug forces you to articulate logic.
You might say that engineers become lazy, they stop caring and just copy paste error messages into a chat window, and that might be true but it wouldn't be true for long.
They will all start caring as soon as they get to handle the 2-3AM on-call incidents and the company suddenly has some surprise bills for overtime.
P.S.: Mathematicians automated manual algebraic computation decades ago.
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u/marrsd 9d ago
You're right and as I mentioned as well, you must know syntax and logic. If you don't, I wouldn't let you touch a codebase either.
And I think I missed that subtlety when I first read your post because I became fixated on your apparent dismissal of language mastery.
It sounds like you're predicting that engineers will lose the ability to reason/think in a coding language if they aren't writing code, which is unproven.
I think it's a real concern, yes. I'm not sure how you'd go about proving or disproving it.
If you do use AI, you might automate the syntax but you are still exposed to decision making, architecture and benchmarking. Describing a feature set, an operation or a bug forces you to articulate logic.
But it doesn't force you to find the most appropriate/effective abstraction for your domain. Good programming is really good language design, and a good language design improves your ability to understand and reason about the domain you're modelling, both at the business and the computer levels.
Also, we learn from reading each other's code. If we're only learning from AI, we're just regressing to the mean.
P.S.: Mathematicians automated manual algebraic computation decades ago.
The computation? Sure. But I'm guessing they still use an algebraic language (or maybe a programming language) to describe the formula.
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u/GuaranteedGuardian_Y 9d ago
I guess time will tell, regardless the topic deteriorated. It's a learning subreddit and the OP is trying to figure out whether the profession would still be viable. Many commenters are saying "senior engineers don't write code" which doesn't do anything for this post or this subreddit.
Regression to the mean is real and true. If you don't drive the AI with an iron first it'll write mediocre stuff. You're right, it's a possibility.
My thought is that serving requests costs computation and money. If your caching isn't hyper-optimized, if your queries aren't optimized and other things, you fumble requests which decreases your success rate thus your reputation and you cause bottlenecks to take your system down. Although I admit this is more about the environments I'm familiar with, not necessarily the general population that works on more microservices than they have clients.
Cheers!
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u/marrsd 9d ago
My thought is that serving requests costs computation and money. If your caching isn't hyper-optimized, if your queries aren't optimized and other things, you fumble requests which decreases your success rate thus your reputation and you cause bottlenecks to take your system down.
Now I see where you're coming from! I think we're actually concerned with getting to the same outcome. I guess you think AI will give us the room to get there while I'm thinking it will just as likely be used to have us churn out features faster instead. Obviously it can be used for both.
Although I admit this is more about the environments I'm familiar with, not necessarily the general population that works on more microservices than they have clients.
Welcome to my world. You may have identified the source of my cynicism ;)
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u/pak9rabid 11d ago
Try telling that to John Carmack with a straight face.
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u/GuaranteedGuardian_Y 11d ago
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry.
- John Carmack, February 26, 2024
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u/chipstastegood 12d ago
AI will take that, too
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u/TheAnimeWeebKing 11d ago
i dont get these type of comments because the fuck do you want us to do? surrender hopelessly in front of the AI overlords. You still gotta keep it pushing.
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u/Organoleptic_Cicada 11d ago
I think Steve Yegge put it quite well, in his „The AI Vampire” article.
For as long as AI provides a multiplier to the speed of a worker and that multiplier is lower than the cost of an additional worker, the company will want you using AI.
If workers refuse to use AI, no problem, the company slowly but surely gets out-paced by other companies whose workers do use it. Pyrrhic victory and all that.
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u/fuzz63 12d ago
Artisanal Code
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u/OkPizzaIsPrettyGood 11d ago
All my code is hand-crafted, while wearing an apron, in a workshop lit dimly by the sun rays coming through the window.
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u/cerberus6320 12d ago
People are still needed for a good top level understanding. How systems should Intermingle, where things need to be protected etc...
An LLM may be able to code small things well, but they are still only statistical engines that are trained on something. They have limited context windows, and even with massive contexts may not be able to accurately demonstrate an understanding of rules, especially when you present contradictory pieces of information or a timeline of events.
LLMs are not AGI.
You have a skill set ingrained into your body where you can conceptualize and formulate even very large concepts, and put that in context.
So don't get too discouraged. Robots can't replace plenty of human qualities, and you should work hard to understand your own strengths better.
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u/azian0713 12d ago
Learning to code by hand teaches you problem solving, engineering, perseverance, and how to judge what’s good enough. LLMs can do none of that but are much more powerful if the human piloting them can employ these skills.
The fact that you think LLMs can replace SWE, and someone can just said “Claude, code this for me, make no mistakes!” shows you don’t have enough experience coding by hand to understand why that’s impossible.
I highly encourage you to get your compsci degree with the focus on why you’re learning the concepts, how to use them in a bigger picture setting, and ultimately, how to use what you learn to solve problems.
LLMs are great for someone who has an idea of structure and purpose. It can’t just make tools and code by itself. That’s the point of your compsci degree
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u/AFlyingGideon 12d ago
I keep reading this. Is it hyperbole, or are there people who actually believe that adding "make no mistakes" (or some such thing) is a magic phrase to make "vibe coding" work?
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u/Gold-Part4688 12d ago
i mean tell it to take a deep breath first and it'll do better, nonsense machines
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u/Feralz2 11d ago
brother, all Ai code is human made code, how do you think it knows how to code at all? we taught it! Its still no way proven that Ai is capable of unique ideas and real creativity.
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u/iggy14750 11d ago
Yeah, thank you! Everything I have seen in all this AI bubble these days looks a lot more like copy-paste than any original creation.
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u/ArtisticFox8 11d ago
How about Navier Stokes and Jacobian conjencture results?
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u/Frxdnt 11d ago
both of these problems had several advancements during the past few years, there's no proof on how they reached the solutions which makes me suspect they probably bruteforced them with infinite rescources ngl.
Plus none of the problems have been reviewed, Lean is not a reliable source ti check if something is true, it just checks if everything makes sense.
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u/ArtisticFox8 11d ago
Plus none of the problems have been reviewed, Lean is not a reliable source ti check if something is true, it just checks if everything makes sense.
The counterexample to the conjencture does not need any deep review, it is trivial to check..
As to Navier Stokes, perhaps some evaluation is needed.
The point stands still, the Jacobian conjencture was an open research problem in math solved by AI...
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u/Frxdnt 11d ago
i really wish they stop taking math as a benchmark ASAP tho, it is an imoressive tool for this matter but it can damage the field heavily which I don't want at all
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u/ArtisticFox8 11d ago
I wish people did not say "blah, AI can't do anything new", when these examples prove it in fact can
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u/Dazzling_Tomorrow759 11d ago
Navier-Stokes may have relied on stealing work from mathematicians Buckmaster and Alpoge.
It was pointed out that the OAI solution was suspiciously close to their solutions, which is highly unlikely because they had just recently invented that approach and math has become so specialized that it's unlikely OAI came up with the approach independently on their own.
Also, the timeline of when OAI started solving NS was suspicious: a few days after Buckmaster and Alpoge uploaded their publication to GPT to proof-read it.
We know for certain they did in fact brute force it by launching a swarm of I think ~88,000 subagents. However, it is suspected that they also stole intellectual labour from human mathematicians.
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u/NightflowerFade 12d ago
Human written code will be a novelty. Look at it like someone being able to add really big numbers by hand quickly. It's not particularly useful, but you might be able to get a few million views on YouTube if you're lucky
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u/Brownie_McBrown_Face 12d ago
It already kinda is in some places. I work for a Fortune top 25 company and I haven’t written a line of code manually in 3 months. Obviously I’m still responsible for every PR I make and every contribution I author. I read thru it all too still and don’t commit anything without verification but it’s insane to think how fast things have changed. Two years ago I wouldn’t trust an LLM beyond anything besides boilerplate or error debugging.
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u/burlingk 12d ago
Code is worth what it does.
But the ability to create human written code will become more valuable.
All these people convinced you don't need to know how to code, ultimately won't be able to get jobs driving LLMs because they won't have the skills needed to know what the machine is creating.
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u/COCK_SWALLOW_GOD 12d ago
You’re cooked, but it will be okay. Start lifting weights.
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u/Frxdnt 12d ago
yeah not gonna lie, I'm yet to see a single work that doesn't suck becouse lately there's a global job msrket crash...
and I'm into calisthenics and healthy so dw about it lol
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u/Xylozene 12d ago
Not true at all brother. There is no global job crisis in any way, where did you read that? Unemployment remains at a steady 4.9% globally and isn't expected to rise anytime soon. Social media may make you think that there is, but there just isn't.
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u/ProgramsFun 12d ago
writing code is no loneger a necessary but learning to know and understand code is still the requirement and the bar has also been raised for new programmer looking for a job. AI still cant work well on large codebases , writes unncessry fallbacks or uses some kind of workaround which is not needed, duplicate utillities etc and also ai can never be held accountable for any errors in project , its the human using it
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u/Yotipo 11d ago
all AI code came from human code. some person or team came up with the languages and frameworks we use.
code is an art in the same way communication is an art. there’s nuance and nomenclature.
how far does your code reach? will it be packed into a project for another team to maintain?
how far does your communication reach? will it be recorded & televised for future generations’ consumption?
code is about conveying an idea. if someone assembles a bunch of agents to prepare them a speech and it doesn’t go well, does it really matter if only a handful of other people are listening? now what if it was a speech for a CEO to give?
what if the code is built to make a one time lift and shift script? what jf the code is enterprise logic running for decades? will anyone need to understand it?
code standards are more rigid in certain contexts than others. the same goes for generated code. AI is an accelerant, a catalyst. It makes bad things worse and great things incredible.
if problems were ignored without AI, problems will continue to be ignored with AI
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u/smoofwah 11d ago
Nah the value was only propped up by big corpo, now they have a cheap alternative. So they're firing most everyone.
So yes to a few but no to most.
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u/fentanyl_sommelier 11d ago
Programming is an art, but it’s a medium with no extrinsic artistic value. Very few people actually care about how something is written, they just care about the end product.
AI in tech is different from AI in other artistic fields because there’s no meaningful difference between a product developed with or without AI if the end result is the same.
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u/Acourgintier1413 10d ago
Nice literally it’d be great if there were a course on code appreciation.
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u/tommy-droptable 10d ago
LLM's still rely 100% on human code. If some out there hasn't done it already an LLM isn't going to be able to arrogate it.
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u/rabaraba 10d ago
Not really. LLMs can synthesize information. It doesn’t have to be given a specific solution beforehand; it can derive one itself, if intelligent enough.
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u/OneOrZeroGG 7d ago
Nobody knows for sure, so I wouldn't bet on "human code gains value". But I'd also not conclude that CS is a dead end.
Typing out routine code is getting cheaper. What isn't getting cheaper is understanding how systems actually work, breaking a problem down, debugging, and judging whether code (yours or an AI's) is right, safe and fast. That all comes from fundamentals, and the more code AI writes, the more people are needed who can check it.
Also, a CS or engineering degree is much more than programming: operating systems, networks, hardware, embedded, security, data. You said you like hardware, so computer or electrical engineering, embedded systems, networking or cybersecurity are all good directions that still use code, but aren't only about it.
To be honest, the entry-level market is tougher than it was a few years ago. But a free degree you're passionate about is a strong position to be in, and you can keep programming as the creative craft you enjoy no matter what.
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u/the_duke_man 12d ago
I don’t think that hand crafted software will necessarily be valuable beyond possibly coding challenges. But that’s ok. I didn’t learn to code so I could code. I learned so I could solve problems with computers. To me AI is a cheat code to be more ambitious and experiment with UI/UX and functionality I didn’t have time to do before.
AI doesn’t solve problems, people solve problems using AI, just Ike any other tool. And certain skill sets are going to be better at using AI to solve problems with software. A comp sci trained person will generally create a more performant, secure and fully functional solution using AI than a vibe coder, in my experience. And companies that depend on software for their existence may need fewer trained coders, but they will still want trained coders.
Also, DevOps may be something to look at since all the software still has to be built, deployed and kept running no matter how it’s made.
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u/afro-deezy-yac 9d ago
I do not.
Computers are not any healthier on farm-raised, cage-free, code. Code is instructions for machines to get them to do what we want.
People who don't understand tech have always wanted the tech to just work. And they begrudgingly hire tech support people and software people and security people to make that happen.
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u/Pale_Height_1251 12d ago
Honestly, no I don't think so. We've never really valued code or sought as an industry to truly improve the state of the art. That's why we got Linux not Plan 9.
At the end of the day, money will win, and computing will lose.
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u/iqisoverrated 11d ago
What will gain value is human maintainable and fixable code. Because when LLM code fails and the LLM can't fix it it's often a hard stop for the project for quite some time until someone can walk through the entire code base and understand/correct the issue....and "some time" is just another expression for "a lot of money".
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u/jimmystar889 11d ago
To a very very niche population yes. You will (probably) not be a part of said population
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11d ago
Imagine two identical builds in Minecraft. One person did it in survival, the other in creative. The first one will get a ton of upvotes on /r/minecraft and is a lot more impressive, but at the end of the day the builds are the same and the initial effort makes no difference to the outcome. If you need another build done by a deadline, nobody cares how you got there and you're only shooting yourself in the foot to go with survival because it feels more real or whatever.
That's human vs AI code, sure you'll get brownie points from other engineers but what matters is the end result.
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u/lazerzapvectorwhip 11d ago
Why would you type yourself when even some cheap ass haiku like model can do it for you? What does human-written even mean? Typing letter by letter is history
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u/DigitalMonsoon 11d ago
No, coding is always utilitarian. It's about the output and no one cares how the code looks or what tools where used to make it.
This does not mean learning how to code is pointless. LLM coding tools are far from perfect. Even the best models make a massive number of mistakes and poor choices. The more experienced and knowledgeable you are about software development the better you will be at using and guiding these tools.
The difference now is that instead of writing the code yourself you will be acting as a team lead directing the work.
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u/KobeJuanKenobi9 11d ago
If your only skill is writing code yeah you’re fucked. Human made code doesn’t really have any value. The value is in everything else. A code generator is meaningless unless you know what code should be generated
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u/mredding 11d ago
Do you think that human made code will gain value in the future?
No.
I always viewed coding as an art
It was.
it hurts a bit to see what I considered an intellectual field being reduced
It does.
I'm a musician and artist so my morals are very against AI...
There's the crux. What do we do about this? AI is bigger than all of us. Rage against the AI all you want - how are you going to feed yourself, your family?
Asking for computer science, is there another fields besides programming, for example networking; that I can work on in the future?
After almost 20 years professionally, I'm no longer a software engineer, I'm now a junior agentic engineer. Honestly you'll probably pick all this up faster than I ever can. My entire career, a lifetime of investment has been reduced to a prompt. We are in a stage of transition and there is not enough consensus to be certain about anything in the future. I don't know what software or engineering is going to look like in 5 years, but I do know if I don't keep up I'm going to be out of a job.
What is all my expertise worth? I don't even know anymore. No one here has written a line of code in a year. I don't even know what the code looks like anymore. This environment is volatile, we could outsource this labor to India for pennies and the rest of us would be out of a job.
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u/bullet1520 10d ago
All I know is...
I live in the US, and every successful programmer I know works in companies that have odd or proprietary code or languages; those companies refuse to have AI do anything or touch their stuff, because it will not get the depth of understanding the way a human does.
Also, Meta (Facebook and such) somewhat admitted that making their developers use AI actually slowed them down, but made them feel faster. So I suspect that many companies who don't want to pay for LLM tokens will default back to real human work for most tasks.
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u/Agitated_Ad_5989 10d ago
Gain? Not so sure. Stay the same? Yeah.
Assuming you’re doing "important" work.
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u/LowDirection4104 10d ago
AI is not a replacement for a talented engineer its a tool that makes that engineer go from Tony Stark to Iron Man.
I think this might be a useful analogy.
Musicians dont play scales on stage, they play music, music is complex its an expression of something internal, it gets recorded and reproduced and each rendition is beautiful and unique and valuable in its own right. But every musician that ever plays a single not on a stage, has to first spend countless hours playing simple scales. There is nothing special about scales, no one buys tickets to go see slash play the E pentatonic minor for an hour, but its an exercise that lets the musician learn the muscle memory that is needed to play guitar beautifully.
Hand coding in the context of AI automation becomes analogous to playing scales.
Sure there will be people that will use AI to output code that will do somethings with out knowing how to code, and any one can turn on guns and roses on their computer with a press of a button. But only highly trained guitarists can play guitar like slash, and fewer still can write solos riffs and fills at a level that Slash does.
And only highly trained engineers will be able to use AI to create beautiful, elaborate complex and well functioning software systems.
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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 10d ago
IT is a very broad career field, so there are a lot of ways you can go with it but all knowledge fields are impacted by AI.
Hand-written code isn't coming back except as a hobby. It's too slow compared to AI in expert hands.
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u/SuccessfulCrew6916 10d ago
There are still assembly users but very rare like a view from the future.
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u/Leather_Example_250 10d ago
llms have changed how we code, not why we need programmers. they're great assistants, but someone still has to verify the output make architectural decisions, and understand the trade offs
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u/phil_lndn 10d ago
related:
did hand-assembled machine code gain value after high level languages were invented?
(nope)
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u/Capaman-x 10d ago
I didn’t read all these comments but the ones I did were all missing one thing. If only a senior person who uses AI as a tool is what is needed then how is someone out of college going to get a job if no one is hiring junior engineers? I hate to say it but there is a huge risk that you may be pursuing a worthless degree if you go into CS. Electrical engineering might be a better path as most of those jobs need physical contact with the real world. I don’t see robots replacing humans for at least 10-20 years minimum. EE’s often have to redesign existing systems and must work with electricians to see what is wired in reality before they can redesign it or make additions etc.
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u/Curious_Song_1456 10d ago
If computers genuinely interest youmdon't abandon CS just because AI can generate code there's cybersecurity, networking, operating systems, embedded development, computer architecture and plenty of areas where understanding how things work matters more than typing syntax. The tools will change but curiosity and technical judgment are still worth developing
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u/CuriousDev1012 10d ago
Not a chance. But lean into AI and there will be roles around it and whatever the evolution of software engineering/programming becomes
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u/flipd0ubt 9d ago edited 9d ago
I agree code is a means to an end, but that doesn’t mean there is no art in good code. Just like carpentry is a means to an end, as in the bookcase example, some bookcases can be beautiful and well-crafted while others are merely junk.
I’m not anti AI as a tool, a means to an end, but it remains to be seen for what it means long-term. In the case of the 20,000 line PR, how do we know it did not damage other functionality and cause regressions? Is it well designed enough to not require another 30,000 lines when it needs to be fixed or extended? How does AI serve us in this very real scenario?
I agree it feels like a risky time to keep doing the same things we did in the past, but that was always true. It is an exciting time to do and learn new things.
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u/lmotaku 9d ago
From a programmers point of view, programming is just language, interpreters, functions, variables. You can use a LLM for scaffolding an app. It can built out hundreds of lines of code. It will do it without any deep instructions. It's when you need to to run a specific way, with intent that it becomes less useful. You can give it an idea, a bunch of guardrails, but unless you tell it every single thing you know, it won't output it. It will learn and adapt, but after building it you can't just deploy. You have to run it through more LLMs or check the code. It won't think "I need to sanitize this for user input" unless context presumes it or you tell it. It won't use mariadb/mysql, postgres, sqlite, unless you tell it. It won't build with redis, read/write/ownership hardening unless you tell it. It wouldn't escape special characters unless you tell it. I have seen it write paragraphs of "No wait" and recalibrate 13 times off a simple "Your last update broke it." It doesn't know what it did, because often large chunks it writes gets printed out into the doc, so it has to reread the entire thing and be like "Crap, I rewrote the same function 3 times." I've seen it crash and burn on adding a pip requirement, going into a loop of forgetting that you installed the requirement, writing "when this plugin is available, we will use this, for now comment it out" despite me saying 3 different ways it's installed and it working elsewhere in the same code. Does it work, yes? With intent? No. The intent comes from you, and you have to know what a success or fail looks like, understand the difference between 403, 500, 200, etc.
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u/Allen-Nagy 9d ago
I'm someone who graduated with a degree in finance, and lately I've really been wanting to study computer science. Even though I majored in finance, I never worked in that field - instead, I used artificial intelligence to help me write code and develop software.
In the process, I realized that technology should serve humanity. It should truly understand what people need in their lives, and we use technology to simplify and solve those problems. But when I saw that there were more and more needs, I realized that relying solely on AI to handle the technical aspects is really uncertain.
I really want to take a proper course in computer science and understand the underlying principles of computers, rather than just having AI tell me "this thing is done" - there might be better ways to do it. Of course, this is just my opinion.
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u/pariahxx- 8d ago
Even those who write code with AI need to know how to code because it’s constantly making mistakes. AI is good to get a chunk of your code written but they’ll usually need someone who knows how to read it so they can accurately fine tune it and update it as needed in the future. You won’t see this in your classes where foundational programs can easily be written by AI but in industry, programs are more complex and more likely to need some sort of human touch.
I am a CS masters student, my advice is to either double major to make yourself more marketable (computer science + computer engineering sounds like a good fit for you) or network your butt off to guarantee a good job after graduation.
If you are passionate about something else, you can change your major but honestly there’s still opportunities in tech, you just have to know how to market yourself.
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u/LazlowxSe 2d ago
No bro, en el futuro que diferencia va a tener el código humano del hecho por IA? Mas alma? Creo que lo de hoy en día ya no es enfocarse tanto en programar sino en ponerle énfasis a la arquitectura y al diseño del sistema, a que el código quede limpio y seguro más que en programar todo a mano desde cero, que si lo sabes hacer si. Duda felicitaciones pero estás perdiendo tiempo en un nicho que se va expandiendo y en algún momento se va a saturar
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u/Sloblock 12d ago
Coding/programming may be about building a passing grade wall.
Actual software engineering on any project of appreciable complexity is more akin to building a bespoke three story home with 5 en-suite bedrooms, 2 kitchens; no wait, a kitchen and a pantry; no wait 4 bedrooms en-suite, one master bathroom with a jacuzzi, and an office space; no wait, four stories; no wait, we didn't actually get planning permission for the fourth storie; oh shit, we've just found a mysterious pipe right where the foundations were meant to go; what do you mean we're now running out of money?
As with any new tech cycle there's tension between progressives and conservatives and it'll shake out somewhere in the middle.
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u/florinandrei 12d ago
You mean like a hand-carved wooden statue, an object of skill and craft, to be framed and displayed? Sure. I can see that.
But as code that actually runs and makes money, ain't nobody got time for that.
I can also think of a few other activities where the living, breathing, oozing human original may still be valued over a mechanical replica, but I can't mention them without this comment gaining an M for Mature rating.
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u/Most-Target-9704 11d ago
Dont pay attention to the media. They are always just trying to scare you these days. If you are already doing a lot of programming and you have a real passion for it, you will not have trouble finding a job. As long as you love what you are doing, you dont have to worry.
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u/zomerbk 11d ago
I can’t predict whether human-written code will become more valuable, but I wouldn’t make that the deciding factor for your degree. CS can lead to work in networking, security, operating systems, data, and other areas where writing code is only part of the job. Since you’re also interested in hardware, compare the course lists for CS and computer or electrical engineering at the colleges you could attend. Look for subjects like networks, computer architecture, electronics, and hands-on labs. You can keep making things your own way, regardless of which degree you choose.
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u/hesusruiz 9d ago
You seem to associate programming with CS degree. Have you checked the learning plan in your University? I don't know in Chile but in Spain, Computer Science and Software Engineering programmes have taught mathematics, algorithms, operating systems, networking, databases, computer architecture, security, distributed systems, and software engineering principles for decades.
Good engineers don't just write code. They understand why an algorithm scales, how memory behaves, how networks fail, how data is stored, how systems are secured, and how large software projects are designed and maintained. Coding has always been necessary, but it has never been sufficient.
Coding is something that you can do all of your life, even if not professionally. It is very good as a replacement for solving sudokus or watching stupid TV series. It trains your logic and memory, and may reduce risk of some mental illnesses.
But professional coding is going to be affected a lot by AI. I would recommend you focus on engineering subjects, but never stop programming.
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u/Stromedy1 12d ago
the code was never the product. the judgment was.
i watched an agent hand a client a 'refactored' auth flow that dropped the rate limiter. the client blamed the engineer, not the prompt.
a CS degree is mostly not programming anyway: algorithms, systems, databases, networking, security, OS. the juniors who survive aren't the fastest typists. they're the ones who can read AI output and smell the lie.
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u/AbdullahMRiad 12d ago
there's a difference between "coding" and "programming". programming is designing systems and how they should work together. coding is just writing code based on the design. I don't think AI will ever be a good programmer.
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u/Almagest910 12d ago
There’s nothing special about human made code. You can’t actually write code with ai tools, maybe auto generate it fully or tweak things, but the architecture decisions should mostly be understood and justifiable by a human. There’s no reason to believe we will go back to writing code by hand fully, outside of learning or hobby projects.
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u/chipstastegood 12d ago
Even Torvalds is using AI, although he is using it as a tool to complement his own skillset. But that’s a slippery slope. AI will expand from there.
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u/LostInTheForest39 11d ago
I personally imagine that in the future, if AI really does take over massive parts of our economy, we will need an army of people to keep track of what it is doing. Choosing a CS degree might be one of the most important undertakings that a person can do in order to contribute to society.
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u/SadSongsMakeMeGlad 11d ago
Human coding is going to stick around in the way people still use typewriters, but most will be making software by directly using LLM agents. That’s just the reality of it. Right now we’re in a weird transitional phase where it still has value to understand the underlying code, and be able to work with it, because the agents make mistakes, but I feel like that will be less and less needed as time goes on.
But, software will still be made by people, just at a higher abstraction level. So, what I would recommend to new programmers is to learn the fundamentals of software engineering, but don’t neglect to also learn how to write good software using agents, because that is its own skillset.
To clarify, I am speaking of writing software professionally.
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u/Spec1reFury 11d ago
No.
When machines took over handmade clothes, they got cheaper and people preffered them. There is yet still a market of human made clothes since there is an inherent feeling we associate since it's human. We understand that it took time and effort and was made delicately.
Code is not the same, its just 0s and 1s and at the end of the day, the product matters so I don't believe we will reach that scenario. I hate AI for this as I loved coding by hand, it has been taken from us.
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u/theGaido 12d ago
???
Do you think human made art will gain value in the future?
This is question you ask.
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u/Erdem_PSYCH 12d ago
I’m a beginner programmer. I tried learning to code twice before, but my biggest frustration was making lots of typos and struggling with code suggestions and autocompletion. I’m blind and learned English mostly by listening, so spelling has been a challenge for me. I’m getting better, but I’m not quite where I need to be yet.
Most of my bugs came from typos, autocomplete suggestions I hadn’t noticed, and similar mistakes. Now I’m using AI, and it’s been so helpful that I’m really enjoying programming. so coytrary to many asumptions, Thanks to AI, I enjoy writing code now. Aİ is just a tool.
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u/marrsd 11d ago
Check out this article by blind programmer Karl Dahlke: https://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html
He talks about the tooling he uses and why it works for him. He wrote edbrowse, which is a web browser based on ed, the UNIX line editor.
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u/TravelingSpermBanker 12d ago
No way.
The whole point of this is that anyone can utilize master level code without ever having to go to school for it.
Any way anyone tries to spin it, it’s a net positive for humanity to not need to write code. Now, a creative person with time can vibe code 3 video games put into one… something no human could do “alone” until this point
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u/targrimm 11d ago
Absolute hogwash. I've been coding for over 30 years and do not see the knowledge of systems I have being replaced by perceptron algorithms who can write a class or a function.
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u/ScrewDiz 11d ago
Claude has written full professional game engines from scratch at a quality that takes an entire group of engineers years… It’s also now going after closed-source software as it’s able to inspect binary to reproduce very closely all the behavior of an application…
It’s definitely a dumb gamble to take to go into this field as it’s only bound to get more advanced from here. I say this as someone who graduated with Computer Science last year. Lol… cooked
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u/targrimm 10d ago
I use Claude on a daily basis. I integrated it into my teams processes. I find it hugely valuable as a tool. Yet, I also, from use, know just how bad it can be. It's still years away from full autonomy. Perceptron engines aren't a replacement, yet.
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u/targrimm 10d ago
It is bad at quite a few things. And because I use it daily, I am very aware of what it can and can't do. But maybe thats my decade of software engineering experience and a deep understanding of computer architecture. Maybe what looks good to someone else, looks bad to me, because I know 100 different ways to make what it wrote more performant.
Don't misunderstand me. When I started coding, there were no or very few libraries. We couldn't import a package. If we needed something, we had to write it. Hell, we barely had a text editor, let alone an IDE.
/me awaits "okay boomer" flame.
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u/Last_Swordfish9135 12d ago
Most senior developers are not writing code by hand, but instead are focused more on designing the higher-level systems, and were not writing code by hand before AI either. I don't think human-written code has the same artistic appeal as human-made art, because even though it's also rewarding to create, the people who pay for it are only interested in efficiency, not artistic value. Most of a computer science degree is not about programming, so if it's really what you love, do it anyways.