Comment by omot
6 days ago
I think of programming languages as an interface between humans and computers. If anything, the industry expanded because of this abstraction. Not everyone has to learn assembly to build cool shit. To me AI is the next step in this abstraction where you don't need to learn programming languages to potentially build cool projects. The hard part of software engineering is scale anyways. My bet is that this will expand the industry in unprecedented ways. Will there be contraction of traditional programming jobs? Absolutely. The growth in tech jobs over the last 20 years weren't more assembly programmers. They were abstraction experts. I'm sure the next wave will be even bigger, professional prompting will explode in size.
The C abstracting the assembly or the GC a abstracting away memory management work because they were possible to implement in a deterministic and reliable way (well, in the case of garbage collection, not all the time)
But I don't think that's a similar situation for LLMs, where the hallucinations or failure to debug their own issues are way too frequent to just "vibe code"