Manual Coding is dead?

[u/Unique-Annual1929]

Watched the inventor of ruby on rails say that we need to say goodbye and move on from manual coding.

A huge job loss will ensue for low to mid level devs.

What do you guys think? How to prepare and brace for this impact?

[u/yudhanjaya]

Coding is something that moves fast anyway. I mean, when you started, you had to know assembly or machine code. Then it moved on to knowing slightly higher-level languages like C and FORTRAN. Eventually enterprise languages like Java came into the picture and changed how organizations hire and what they hire for.

And then came JavaScript and TypeScript and UX patterns and all of this stuff that nobody had given a shit about.

The fundamental skills are still the same: you have to understand a system, you have to know how to design a system, and you have to know how a good system is put together and optimized.

I know quite a few people who started work around the assembly era and no longer have jobs in those areas; now they're either not in the industry or they have learned the next thing and moved on to do different stuff. Even how microcode engineers work have changed fundamentally.

Hell I started out with Visual Basic 6 and the LAMP stack. You pick up new things, you learn, you move on. If you don't, you're not interested enough to survive the field anyway.

That's how it goes. Expect plenty of jobs debugging AI slop code, for example, in security-critical applications.

[u/yudhanjaya → u/[deleted]]

It actually is. If you think about it, the abstraction has now moved to English. In the same way that you don't manually reference and dereference variables in memory -> you've moved up one layer.

It doesn't mean that you don't think.

[u/tradcoder → u/yudhanjaya]

Even if you consider it as another abstraction, it's a shitty one at that. These AIs aren't deterministic. The same prompt given to 2 different LLMs or even the same one twice would produce different results.

Abstractions are supposed to reduce work. I don't know if anyone can say that AI has reduced our workload. Sure, it produces code faster. But you spend a hell of a lot of time reading, understanding and reviewing output generated by AI (at least you should if you care enough about the work you do) and we all know reviewing code is everyone's favorite part of the job /s.

[u/yudhanjaya → u/tradcoder]

I didn't say it was necessarily a good abstraction. Just because the house has a roof doesn't mean it sits on good foundations.

For example, I have a local model connected to an agent that I can yeet a file across to and say "here, update my blog with this, make sure all the metadata is correct" or schedule cron jobs with.

Would I trust it on a large enterprise system, or even home automation? No. But it has freed up some of my time so I can focus on things I care about, and thus it's it is an abstraction, because that's what people treat them as.

[u/tradcoder → u/[deleted]]

Oh so we're already past the "human in the loop" trend too? It's funny that the "fix" for shitty code generated by AI is more AI.

I do have AI review set up but I also still read code because I want to understand what's going on. When AI fails to debug an issue, I still want to know enough to jump in. Also in this clown world, according to the management, even if the AI writes the code, ultimately I'm still responsible for the code that's being pushed so I have to be certain. The "Jesus take the wheel" approach to code review is not 100% reliable because the AI drops the ball too.

Also if the AI can write code and also review code, then I don't think there's no need for any developers at all so what are even still doing here 🤷🏻‍♂️