Comment by beernet

12 hours ago

Coding is not dead. No one stops you guys and nobody intends to.

I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

I heard him say that too. And he's probably right. But it's more like every knitter now has access to an automated loom.

Oddly I feel AI is getting me off the endless learn new tech churn. I was looking at a few odd ball programming books on my shelf, graphics programming from scratch and retro game dev (c64 edition and nes editions) and thinking I might now have time to work through these instead of learning technology x.

https://www.retrogamedev.com/

https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/

And I'll be manually coding as I want to learn!

  • > off the endless learn new tech churn.

    you make a good point. I lost interest around "MCP" in all this; now we're up to people not understanding map reduce and manually garbage collecting for the AI.

    I have the Minix book, somewhere...

The OpenClaw inventor? Ok, sure. I think this is sort of cute. The idea that it is just great that all knowledge work would just be a "hobby" when that logically a world in which there would be no leisure would be quite amusing if it is wasn't so depressing.

> Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

How is that a good thing? Sounds insanely dystopian to me. Especially considering all the other jobs that will be affected too.

knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

  • > In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

    Equally true for today's AI coding agents

    • Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc.

      In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.

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  • Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.