Comment by lordnacho
3 hours ago
You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want.
Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people can translate English to Fortran.
Now, you can just think about your program in English, and so long as you actually know what you want, you can get a Fortran program.
The issue is now what it was originally for senior programmers: to decide what to make, not how to make it.
The hard part of software development is equivalent to the hard part of engineering:
Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in (for example, poor choice of heat insulation for the local climate) is the stuff people train on. Not the sketching part.
It's the same for software development. All we've done is replace FORTRAN / Javascript / whatever with a subset of a natural language. But we still need to thoroughly understand the problem and describe it to the LLM. Plus the way we format these markdown prompts, you're basically still programming. Albeit in a less strict syntax and the "compiler" is non-deterministic.
This is why I get so mythed by comments about AI replacing programmers. That's not what's happening. Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code. And the orgs that think they can replace developers with AI (and I don't for one second believe many of the technology leaders think this, but some smaller orgs likely do) are heading for a very unpleasant realisation soon.
I will caveat this by saying: there are far too many naff developers out there that genuinely aren't any better than an LLM. And maybe what we need is more regulation around software development, just like there is in proper engineering professions.
> Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code.
Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)
Again, I don't think most people are prepared to articulate what behavior they want. Fortran (and every other formal language) used to force this, but now you kusr kind of jerk off on the keyboard.
Reactionarily? Sure. Maybe AI has some role to play there. Maybe you can ask the chatbot to modify settings.