- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/917810
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Man. I so feel this. I’m 51 and started programming when I was 10. It’s not anything like it used to be. I miss those days.
This quote on the abstraction tower really stood out for me:
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack. AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain.
I feel like they kind of lost the thread here, even though I think I agree with the idea that vibe coding is a fundamentally different thing than another layer of abstraction. There’s no need to punch on the web developers. We’ve all known, for the last several decades at least, that we don’t have to understand the entire mechanism completely. No one is out there doping their own silicon and writing JS apps to run on it. The whole point of layered abstractions is that you can build on a set of assumptions without having to know all the implementation details of the layers below. When an abstraction leaks, then it can be useful to have some facility with the lower levels, but no person alive is a master of the full stack. The beautiful thing about abstractions is that you don’t have to be. That’s still true with vibe coding, just with the extra complexity of having a ticker tape spitting out semi-coherent code faster than any human could type it, which moves the dev from a creative role to more of an administrative one, as they mention earlier in the piece, which 1) is not nearly as fun, and crucially 2) doesn’t help you build the muscles that make one good at code administration.
You think people writing C(++) for baremetal systems don’t understand how their hardware works?
LLMs don’t add an abstraction layer. You can’t competently produce software without understanding what they’re outputting.
The author’s point is that people already don’t understand what the programs they write do, because of all the layered abstraction. That’s still true whether or not you want to object to the semantics of calling the use of LLMs an abstraction layer.
Not knowing what cpu instructions your code compiles to and not understanding the code you are compiling are completely different things. This is yet another article talking up the (not real) capability of LLM coding assistants, though in a more round about way. In fact, this garbage blogspam should go on the AI coding community that was made specifically because the subscribers of the programming community didn’t want it here, yet we keep getting these trying to skirt the line.
I mean you can …but its gonna be slop.
One can get paid and advance through a career producing slop.
Good engineering is hard, and lots of that no longer happens.
Notice the heavy use of the em-dash throughout that post?
There is much debate about whether the use em-dash is a reliable signal for AI generated content.
It would be more effective to compare this post with the author’s posts before gen AI, and see if there has been a change in writing style.
Aww you’re no fun. Stop with the nuance.
I say that knowing how often those words have been wrong throughout history.
Yup
Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this.
A swing and a miss
Technically it would have been true, it’s just that A"I" does not deliver on that promise.
