YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Yes, and

57 points Michelangelo11 12 hours ago 15 comments

samstress 11 hours ago | parent

No, but... is the better answer in my mind. Learning to code is a considerable commitment. It takes years to get good enough to produce professional-grade software. If you extrapolate from the improvements we've seen in coding AI over just the last 12 months, this is just a bad allocation of your time.

Instead, as the article points out, learn to become a translator between the real world and AI code generation. Learn about industries that are relatively underserved by technology. Don't build tools for developers or engineers. Learn about construction, mining, waste management, oil and gas, manufacturing, logistics, government... then become the link between that industry and AI's ability to add value.

(Emphasis on relatively underserved — all of these have high-tech versions in some places, but the future isn't distributed evenly.)

smcg 1 hour ago | parent

Well, it's sad that the professor's advice for how to get a job today is "networking", same as it always was. I feel bad for those who don't have family or friends who work in the industry.

trentnix 31 minutes ago | parent

I think you have a pretty narrow view of things if you consider "family or friends who work in the industry" as the only form of networking. Clubs, conferences, online communities, and build-and-release-useful-things are all effective forms of networking.

The job market is the pits and feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of aptitude and ethics. Lots of old paths are getting very narrow. Some are closing.

But we now have tools that let you just build big things, all by yourself. In this new world, bonafide coding expertise is helpful. But it's not required. New graduates should just get out there and start making things.

chaps 23 minutes ago | parent

I think you have a significantly narrower view than them. Consider someone moving to a new city or someone getting out of jail. It takes time to do the networking you're talking about. People need to eat and networking doesn't fill your stomach.

shaewest 17 minutes ago | parent

And that's one of the risks of moving to a new city, and arguably one of the risks you take when you commit a crime worthy of jail.

As for the new city risk, you take that risk with the potential upside it could bring, but everyone will be wary. People new to a city are a risk because of all the reasons they might've left an old city.

bluefirebrand 3 minutes ago | parent

> People new to a city are a risk because of all the reasons they might've left an old city.

What do you mean? You go to a new city in search of new opportunities, not to escape anything bad. The same reason you go to a new country, right?

easterncalculus 1 minute ago | parent

The author shows his age by recommending that student to go into a cost center at Costco. In AI resume land you really need the keywords more than ever to both start and keep a career in this industry.

tengbretson 1 hour ago | parent

> I explain that, if they don’t write the code, they will not be able to effectively read the code. The ability to read code is certainly going to be valuable, maybe more valuable, in an AI-based coding future.

I'm not certain of this. Thinking back to when I first started in my career after graduation- I remember feeling like my ability to write code had improved greatly during my time in school. Meanwhile, my ability to read code felt like it had barely improved at all. Even now, after over a decade in the industry, while both skills have improved tremendously, I still feel like my ability to read and internalize code is not at the level I would like or assume it to be simply as a result of my experience.

It could very well be that reading and writing are two separate (though related) skills that require intentional practice and honing on their own. I can't speak for everyone, but reading code as a skill, for me, only really began to develop once I had a job where it was expected of me.

Maybe it's possible to learn to read code without learning to write it. It certainly feels like its possible to learn to write it without learning to read it.

johsole 54 minutes ago | parent

I disagree with the author. I think as LLMs get better at coding it will be more likely that that fewer devs will be required to keep systems running and progressing, the bottleneck at my company is already new revenue generating ideas. We've seen a roughly 30% increase in speed of new features, so the same number of devs are building a lot quicker. I expect that to continue to increase. I also see a lot of Devs simply trusting that the code is correct, they are losing touch with the code.

I don't think I would encourage my kids to get involved with programming, instead I would encourage them to become entrepreneurs who might use some coding.

simonw 46 minutes ago | parent

I think people who understand how computers and software work will be better positioned to generate those new ideas.

bluefirebrand 7 minutes ago | parent

In my experience, new ideas are mostly generated by people who are involved in non-software stuff

A software engineer isn't going to come up with a revolutionary new mining technique or robot or something. But someone who works at a mine might. Previously those people would go find a software engineer to try and validate their idea. Now they will go to AI

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't see software engineers as being the best people to generate a lot of new ideas for domains outside of software engineering

simonw 2 minutes ago | parent

I think the best ideas come from people who have both domain knowledge and an understanding of what's possible. Computer science gives you the latter.

If I was going through university right now I'd want to double-major in computer science and something else.

dkarl 7 minutes ago | parent

> I also see a lot of Devs simply trusting that the code is correct, they are losing touch with the code

It'll be interesting to see if this is sustainable. I could see it going both ways, and I honestly don't know which is most likely.

layer8 8 minutes ago | parent

> Is Coding → Prompting like Assembly → High Level Coding? […] I do not agree with this simile. Compilers are, for the most part, deterministic in a way that current AI tools are not.

It’s not quite about the determinism. It’s about being able to reason about the relationship between source code and compiled program with formal precision. You can predict which changes in the source code will lead to which exact changes in the behavior of the compiled program. The same isn’t the case about changes to an LLM prompt and the LLMs output.

You could make an AI deterministic by fixing its source of randomness. That still wouldn’t allow you to reason about how its output will change when (for example) you add or remove a word in the prompt. The only way to find out is to run the LLM (= have the prompt run through the model and observe what comes out).

That is the fundamental difference. Changes to source code have predictable and reason-able outcomes. You generally don’t have to compile the code and test it to know how precisely the change will affect the behavior of the compiled program according to the semantics of the programming language. That’s the case even if the compiler uses some probabilistic heuristics for trade-offs in code generation, and hence isn’t deterministic on the machine code level.

To repeat, the difference is how you can reason about a compiler’s behavior versus an LLM’s behavior. Programming languages are designed such that you can reason about it. With LLMs it’s always an experiment.