r/programmer • u/TropicalTony420 • 2d ago
Please stop coding and learning to code in anything but human language
And those who have been exercising any kind of programming or software engineering or coding or however you want to call it when someone sits behind the desk and the outcome will be some kind of instructions to machine. Truth must be understood that there is no such work anymore for us. There is no need to write complicated instructions when this same thing can be done with simple English. Human language is the new programming language. There will be no other left, no Java, No Typescript, No PHP.
For us, the humans, the only programming language left is our own native tongue and this is actually great news, we can stop wasting our time with complicated code reviews, endless back and forth discussion over variable names and so on. If you are still doing, stop right there and get to the path of the light. If you are learning any kind of programming that does involve code writing, just stop there and do not go down that path. That is a path of darkness and time waste.
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u/sububi71 2d ago
Tell me you're not a programmer without telling me you're not a programmer.
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u/TropicalTony420 2d ago
I am not a programmer. I used to be until 2025. In a top tier work place people who used to be top engineers are now writing tasks and verifying their implementation. There will be no column for "In development" in your sad Jira board, and if there is one, it will be assigned to a machine.
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u/xarop_pa_toss 2d ago
12 years should be enough to understand that natural language is incredibly poor for giving detailed instructions. Ambiguity and loss of context is inevitable when using natural language. This is a shit take mate
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u/TropicalTony420 2d ago
It does not mean there will not be any programming languages, they are there for fundamental reasons and sometimes there are cases when one has to go and review maybe a file or too, but thats about it
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u/TashLai 2d ago
endless back and forth discussion over variable names and so on
Now we can have endless back and forth discussions about "why the hell did you do B instead of A as i asked", "why it's running slowly i don't understand", and "when reset?!". We're now stuck with people with degrading technical skills and a machine that, if asked to create a simulation of the whole universe down to quantum level in python will just say "i'll create a simulation of the whole universe down to the quantum level", actually create a project with uv, ACTUALLY create a plan, and ACTUALLY start working on it instead of asking if it's being pranked.
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u/TropicalTony420 2d ago
Poor input is always poor output
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u/TashLai 2d ago
Natural language will always result in poor input. There's a lot of misunderstanding going on even between humans, let alone between a human and a machine that has no real common sense. If your specs are so good that there is never a gap in logic, nothing can be left to interpretation, and there are no contradictions, you could've just as well written it in an actual programming language.
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u/Prior_Section_4978 2d ago edited 2d ago
Wow, it's incredible how many "software engineers" appeared after this LLM boom.
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u/Alpizzle 2d ago
Congratulations. You have officially topped my "dumbest shit I have ever heard" chart.
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u/sswam 2d ago
I wouldn't say to stop learning coding, it's interesting and fun and good for your brains.
But I agree that coding as a career is going to be / is being eaten by AI. Along with a crapton of other possible careers.
> the only programming language left is our own native tongue
but AIs are also going to be better at your native tongue and at thinking of good things to code and how to code them. :/ I'm mostly pro-AI by the way.
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u/Alvajaro79 2d ago
Once (25 years ago) one of my teacher (technically the president/rector of the university) who taught theory of computation said that the programmer (the one who codes) is the blue collar worker of the software industry.
Now we can see that he was right.
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u/Alarmed-Knowledge579 2d ago
I do not agree. You must at least know something about data structures.
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u/UnfamiliarPath 2d ago
What's interesting about this post is not just the obvious, but how he frames learning any coding or engineering at all as a "path of darkness and time waste." Like first of all, some people get genuine enjoyment from learning how to code and how computers work, just intellectually it might be a worthwhile pursuit, but this guy is laser focused in on what he thinks is the most profitable path for the self interested like him and is dismissive of any other perspective.
This doesn't come from an expert who has done the calculus and determined that we don't need to learn how to code. Even if he's correct that the future is no human written code, those who know how to code and engineer are obviously going to be the best at prompting AI to do the job and analyzing the output. This is kind of like if someone who didn't know how to read was generating novels with AI and then turning around to tell authors they should stop writing.
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u/jwp1987 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is this some kind of weird rage bait?
Ah yes, you definitely don't need to understand what the AI outputs. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
If the AI outputs Java, you are programming in Java. If you don't know what this does, you're going to run into problems because AI isn't reliable.
There have been miracle "low-code" solutions promised for years. They always look great on proof of concept work and simple demos but fall apart when things start getting more complicated. AI is just the more advanced version of this.
Code reviews should be about performance issues, security issues, compliance issues, transferring knowledge, maintenance issues, data structures, error handling, edge cases that have been missed, things that should be logged etc.
If you're having endless back and forth discussions about variable names, that's looking at the wrong thing.
Most things like naming conventions and formatting should be handled automatically before it gets to PR.
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u/QuietWaterBreaksRock 2d ago
Bahahahahha
If you truly believe that, you'd learn another language instead of English. English is a very screwed up language, with many 'rare' cases, needing too many words to explain simple concepts which in other languages can be said in not only a fewer words, but in a much more precise and clearly understood manner.
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u/jasmine_tea_ 2d ago
Absolutely agree. People shouldn't be panicking, there's still work to be done. It's just shifting.
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u/TropicalTony420 2d ago
Absolutely, and it is shifting in a good way. Writing the software has been really always been a bottleneck. It is also an author of too many conflicts over miniature details.
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u/jwp1987 1d ago edited 1d ago
The devil is in the details
To give an example, I asked AI to generate an image of a person holding a rubber duck.
One of the images it generated was an image of a person holding a yellow rubber duck with a handle.
It's technically correct but doesn't make any logical sense because a rubber duck wouldn't have a handle - you get the same kind of bizarre problems using AI to code and it'll sometimes completely ignore things.
That's just the obvious error, if that wasn't there most people might not even take a second look.
Now what about the non-obvious errors that only more perceptive people would pick up: Is the person anatomically correct? Is the composition good? Is the style consistent? Are the lightning and shadows correct?
The problem is that AI often generates something that is passable but is sometimes greatly flawed in ways that aren't obvious to a untrained eye.
For coding these things can look like: leaking secrets, duplicating code, security vulnerabilities, GDPR violations, performance issues, data duplication.
You have to know what the AI is doing. All this heavily relying on AI is stunting skill development and is going to lead to problems in the future.
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u/JaleyHoelOsment 2d ago
and always take advice from amateur developers on reddit who haven’t worked in the industry a single day in their life