Posted by senko 2 days ago
Typing is easy. Coding is hard. LLMs eliminate the typing and aid with all the other parts of writing code (where is the system that I want to mutate, how does it work today, debate the tradeoffs inherent in the potential plans of action).
What remains after factoring out the typing and the time spent assembling an understanding of code is opportunity cost. That's not an insult any more than memory managers are an insult to languages like C.
The comparison does not imply that coding is an easy thing to do, just that it's easier than being really, really good at the bigger picture.
What Carmack did wasn't hard because writing C is hard.
That’s what people mean by this.
That didn't mean she understood baking better than I did. If something went wrong, I usually knew why and what to do about it. If someone gave me direction and wild requests, I could get us there, meanwhile she could not. If things didn't work out, her solution was more likely to be "find another recipe"... and finally, the part that "validates" the ego of bakers, if you looked at everything we both made, I'm sure mine was better on average.
BUT... if what people actually value is "who made a great carrot cake tonight?", then yes, baking is easy. All she had to do was find a recipe detailed enough for her and apply it without majorly messing up.
I think that's what the "coding was never the hard part" argument is getting at. The fact that programming has difficulty that people spend decades mastering it, or that the best programmers can do things ordinary programmers cannot does not tell you how much of that depth is actually required to produce the software people value. Which is, tbh, very little.
Anyway, I could spread this analogy further but this is long as it is so I will stop here. It just reminded me of when people accused me of "just knowing how to pick a good recipe" as a way of reducing my development efforts, and it made me laugh.
"Code was never the hard part" is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Making something work, has always been easier than making something someone can read. AIs also, seem to benefit from clean abstractions, appropriate code reuse, etc. (coincidentally, the thing they suck most at).
It's the same thing with english, except that english doesn't have a compiler. Comprehension is the only measure of communication if you're talking about a human language. Programming shares the same goal. Both, often also need to do something else useful. Programming, and lawyering, have a lot more in common than people think.
We're creating a culture of sh*tting on codebases so the highest paid execs can cash out when things get tough. It isn't a new phenomenon, but it's one we'll need to endure until enough people lose enough money that the accountants start taking notice and start saying "you should be more careful, or you'll lose your shirt". In the interim, the people that care are working insane hours to try to protect the things they believe in from inevitable doom, and risking being fired to do it. There is a balance to both sides, and the jury is out on whether or not anthropic/openai/alibaba can save us from the future we are creating now with short-term goals.
nothing has changed since then.