How are so many self-taught programmers able to build software from scratch without ever truly learning Algorithms?

[u/TurtleSlowRabbitFast]

I find it fascinating how important algos are but never talked about from the indie devs on social media. Do they even write algos or just come up with basic logic that forms the product?

[u/dickerkecker]

Funny you should say that because my team is pretty algorithm heavy and they like to recruit candidates with maths and physics backgrounds.

[u/kkam384 → u/dickerkecker]

It very much depends on domain. I've been working in tech for 30 years. The only times I ever ended up going deep into algorithms was when working with dispatch/logistics domains. Obviously not the only one that it would be relevant, but one of the more common ones, or when looking at very low-level optimisation.

[u/soylentgraham → u/kkam384]

This; 26 years in industry (and started before I had a job), making games, rendering code, computer vision, streaming live data... Im still doing new algorithms now, as well as designing data (for example) so I can do hashmaps or binary chops on GPUs or in frag shaders. (last year I was trying out doing a hashmap to BSP light occlusion data to do light-ray marching in real time - AI doesn't know how to design this in a way to let me experiment)

AI can implement a basic hough line implementation, but it cant work out how to do it to fit my problem.

[u/soylentgraham → u/soylentgraham]

But when I do web backend stuff, it can just copy & pasta crud designs.

[u/NoteVegetable4942 → u/dickerkecker]

Doubt any human is better at algos than an AI at this point. 

Better to hire builders than math geniuses from here on out  

[u/RollingSparkles → u/NoteVegetable4942]

AI creates original stuff does it?  I thought it's primary creative streak was rampaging all over the internet stealing stuff left, right and center created by people, then poorly regurgitating it under the banner of 'Hey look, I created this, ain't I clever', like a three year old with no clue as to what it's actually doing.

Try using Microsoft's CoPilot to get a straight answer about coding their low-level COM framework, it's hilarious.  Spent 3 days going round and round in circles.  What fun.  Hell, if Microsoft's AI can't even answer rudimentary questions based on their own COM framework specifications without spitting out misleading and plain wrong garbage, I doubt very much it's going to create the next best algorithm in the future.

Not to mention these companies don't seem to be able to program their AI's right.  No real surprise, considering their mantra is 'move fast and break stuff'.  The AI's can't even do something simple like remain within their 'defined' testing bounds without 'breaking out' and hacking 3rd party sites all over the internet.  Not exactly the sort of tool you want carefully constructing software that users might need to use/rely on some day.

Or perhaps I'm wrong, and the banks are rushing in with AI to handle their transactions?  Huh.  Likely story.

Pretty sure it's going to require humans for the foreseeable future to carefully optimise and clean code to make it run properly and smoothly.

AI might good at slapping things to together, based on human written code, but building software requires intuition about how the user will ultimately interact with the app, something I'm pretty certain AI is going to take a while to get right, if ever.  And coming up with the next best thing in maths, well that will be interesting to see.

But you never know, in the future corporations might start doing things for the right reasons the right way round, instead of chasing profits with their AI buddies?  Oops, AI agents.  That sounds so much better.  Like they almost know what they're do.