The article gives the example of Bun's successful Zig to Rust of why this is the end of programming. I think that rewrite is a perfect example of why it's NOT the end of software engineering. A non-programmer could not have prompted AI to do that rewrite, and in fact a non-programmer would not have even conceived of the idea of doing that rewrite in the first place. Somebody is still needed to 1. understand that a Zig-to-Rust rewrite is necessary to achieve certain technical goals 2. prompt the AI to do the rewrite, clearly describing the before-and-after architecture, the goal of the rewrite, and technically verifying the result.
Neither 1 nor 2 can be done by someone who doesn't even know what Bun, Zig, or Rust is, let alone deeply understand how those work. In fact, even I as a programmer with decades of experience but without specific experience in Bun, Zig or Rust probably couldn't do a proper rewrite.
I don't know if this is the end of programming, but i can clearly observe the gradual end of expertise in my company - people slowly forgetting architecture, principles, and how stuff works in general, in favor of code delivery speed.
And without expertise you end up asking stupid things to a token producer machine, however godlike it can be.
I guess in most industries speed was always the primary concern. Things like architecture and principles were there only to prevent things slowing down to a crawl. A way to protect that speed
No, it was to build things that were good enough. I am watching initiative after initiative fail after a rapid PoC phase, the more in depth the LLM dependence the quicker the codebase becomes unmanageable.
And who will fix the slop? Not Silicon Valley programs being paid $200K or whatever. We stand on the verge of a golden age of outsourcing in software which will make all previous phases of outsourcing look like trial runs.
Won't this mean that a lot of developers in Silicon Valley will find themselves out of a job? If the competition (AI operators) can sit 8000 miles away and be paid peanuts.
The whole point is that we’re TikToking the software industry and no one will know what to tell the ai to get the software written in a way that works. It’s in principle the same as idiocracy where no one knows how to make burrito covers anymore because shit won’t grow
This is a strong article with a distracting headline. Challenge for commenters: can you discuss the content without getting caught up in the headline?
My favorite paragraph:
> The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.
For me, this captures what's special about the Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol class of models. If you can reduce a problem to a clearly verifiable end state, provide the necessary context, and equip a model with the necessary tools it can usually get to a good solution.
Reducing problems to that state and designing that environment remains a skill, and one that I expect we will be paid handsomely for.
> If you can build a verification system and give proper direction,
That's called programming. The Bun tests are the result of years of programming. If you have to spend years programming an oracle before, programming is not ended. This is not just the headline claim. They are also making the claim in the article. `What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction.`
I'd also note the $165,000 figure is cited for the 11 day sprint, but this has only been merged months later with both employees and agents hammering away at it. The true cost of this rewrite is likely in the millions.
There's also the quality angle. It's taken as a given that because Claude Code is using it in production, it must be quality software. This couldn't be further from the truth. Claude Code is absolute dogshit software that nobody in their right mind would even consider using if Claude didn't gatekeep their subscription subsidy token rates behind it. It is the absolute worst of any possible harness that anybody uses seriously.
Don't get me wrong, this is impressive in some degree. It is a genuine feat of software engineering to have written a class of programs that can generate other programs of this scale. But the claims of its relevance and impact are wildly, wildly overstated. Note also the exponential growth in Github commits, and yet there is not a single piece of non-LLM related, LLM-generated software that I use, or that I have felt has improved as a result. There is no massively popular new software that regular end consumers are using, just a bunch of .md file wrappers for certain types of developers to wank over. To the contrary, software in general appears to be degrading even more rapidly than it already was, with major Windows issues, Github issues, outrageous security breaches [as a result of woefully incompetent security practices rather than amazingly competent offensive practices], etc. becoming more and more common.
In our shop, we are understanding that the art of "designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages" (Source: wikipedia) shifted to LLMs does not mean that programming has ended, but that expectations around what and how humans do programming has changed and will continue to change. We still need humans who understand how databases should work and should be designed/evolved because these humans are the consumers of the programs. The prompters (programmers) are the consumers. LLMs are not consumers. Without programmers, LLMs don't do any work.
LLMs will accelerate the proliferation and searchability of ideas. Many times I've been using an LLM and it'll suggest ideas I would have never come across naturally that have been beneficial to whatever I happened to be implementing. For learning in general, it's been the most delightful tool I've ever used.
On the other hand, if you're working in an industry where you and your coworkers are developing novel solutions that aren't widely known, chances are you'll still be doing that by hand with some light LLM automation. There are industries with a lot of gatekept secrets where LLMs will be less useful. What I will say on that matter is this: if you weren't surprised frontier labs stole copyrighted work for training data, you'd do well to mind what you push through their systems.
I agree with the thesis. Development is moving towards intent and alignment and clear understanding of needs. These have always been important but in a future where code is almost free, customers will be more demanding about having their needs met, fast.
Our SaaS company is making plans to move towards bespoke development, which until now has been far too costly for most customers to accept. It also violates the multi-tenant cost/business model, so we're scrambling to figure out what hosting and ops and support agreements look like in a bespoke future.
The implications here go well beyond development. I'm seeing pretty massive changes happening in finance, consulting, HR, accounting, law, design, architecture, health, and everything else. When the value of intelligence is effectively zero, how are humans supposed to market and sell themselves in the job market? Some white collar people might try to move into physical jobs for job security, but it will only take a fraction of white collar workers to migrate to crater wages there too.
We're not ready for this. Socially, economically, and politically. Look at how we treated middle Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs when they were offshored to China. Hillary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." We'll watch jobs and industries disappear while clinging to our own and praying that it's not us today.
UBI is going to be inevitable soon, but it's also woefully insufficient. Giving a developer who used to earn $100k $20k per year UBI isn't going to placate their white hot rage at the social contract being broken. We're going to need universal high income, and paying for that is going to be such a radical social change that I worry voters won't accept it until things are dire.
Such a big disconnect in the coverage of coding models and the output they produce.
If you discard coding purity questions like style, architecture, cleanliness - the stuff they come out with is buggy & error prone.
The problems seems architectural - in that context windows are limited and you need more compute to increase them, married with the fact the models are really over confident. But if you do increase them it causes mode collapse. Yann LeCun has a really good graphic in his slides of a circle (all possible answers) and a red line coming from the centre depicting a path in the circle that at some point chose the wrong token and continued on to an incorrect conclusion. How do you actually fix that? I don't think it's possible.
I've had so many times in my day job someone has told me (Claude told them) there is a bug in my code, I look at it and nope - it just didn't look up the right file. Then you push back on it and it completely crumbles and says sorry.
I wouldn't keep an employee hired who did that over and over again and never learned
I think the best glimpse into the future is the bugginess and engineering laziness of Claude Code itself.
New versions ship daily and I seem to hit brand new issues every day. They disappear after a few more updates, but it's damn annoying to keep up instead of doing work, and the direction of changes is lacking at best. The underlying technology otherwise seems nothing short of a miracle, but the contrast is eye-opening.
In industries where this is acceptable, that's the future. In ones that can't tolerate it, it isn't. I hadn't expected software engineering itself to be one of the former but it's kinda obvious in retrospective.
From TFA: "What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction."
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
Hm. I'm someone who stills prefers to code by hand, and one of my hobbies is to go do some work in my blacksmith shop down in my barn. While my wife enjoys making our own clothes by hand and quilting.
OK, I think I'm going to bow out of these discussions. Clearly I'm not as into tech as I though I was.
It's a highly paid, in demand career path where formal education is optional.
They came for the sysadmins first because they had more power, but they were always coming for you.
Even if "Agentic Coding" doesn't solve programming, there is an aligned incentive not to care, I've heard directly from the executives at large companies that they despise the amount of leverage software programmers have... and now they have an excuse to end it on a unified front.
That is sufficed to say that many people in our profession don't actually care about software development or programming, they just saw a lucrative career path.
My personal and somewhat bitter opinion is that the profession will be more enjoyable for me once all the people who are only in it for money leave. I can live a blue collar salary life working in tech and still enjoy it. Maybe I'll have less scrum masters and shit. Thank god.
My personal take is that the AI era will be a rough brush that will help shed all the accumulated cruft in this profession.
I think highly technical, knowledgable people will remain, and thrive in a few years, and all the rest will move on to the next fad, or whatever pays the most.
The reason a segment of the current market will remain is because LLMs still need steering, we are not at a point where an abstract idea can go from Tweet to product, and we are many many leagues away from that. Of course, this has been noted to oblivion before, so I'm not really providing shocker value at all here.
If I thought this would happen I would've done something else with my life. There's still some fun to be had, and I'll probably stay in the industry because it pays well and I have history here, but the magic has largely died.
I essentially have the opposite opinion, you're going to lose people who had a lot of passion and be left with people who are content writing prompts for money.
The end of programming and the birth of metaprogramming. The art of writing programs that write programs, which itself is significantly harder than writing programs themselves. In fact I'm glad to see this happening because at most shops the use of metaprogramming is minimal to non-existant. (see Linux/Chromium/Firefox/Android)
LLMs are scarily good at translation, whether between natural or between programming languages. Also very good at re-implementing the stuff that has been provably done before. And, arguably, 90-95% of writing code is exactly that.
Considering the direction that InfluxDB has taken over the years, making insanely terrible product and tech decisions, chasing shiny new things, breaking the Open Source edition further and further while not being able to offer a competent sales process for the commercial one, I think it's fair to take the opinions of the author with a mountain of salt.
He is right. The GitHub graph shows that most code is already no longer written by humans, and the shape of the graphs (as well as the recent pace of LLM progress as measured by various benchmarks) tell us that human programming is going to become a niche activity in the near future.
The main reason that I'm in the process of switching jobs is to get more money, in case we are fucked as a profession later on. So yeah, even if I don't necessarily believe this is the future, I am certainly making sure that if it is the future I will be more comfortable.
Nope. Not yet. The frontier still produces slop and never refactors. Your code base will grow with the square of your features and grind to a halt. God speed to folks that work at this shop.
if you tell it to do a thing it'll try it's best to make you think that it was done. I rarely get good refactors from AI unless I tell it specifically what to do.
Neither 1 nor 2 can be done by someone who doesn't even know what Bun, Zig, or Rust is, let alone deeply understand how those work. In fact, even I as a programmer with decades of experience but without specific experience in Bun, Zig or Rust probably couldn't do a proper rewrite.
And without expertise you end up asking stupid things to a token producer machine, however godlike it can be.
It's hard not to extrapolate...
Functionality iterations or adaptations are just faster with good architecture and principles.
My favorite paragraph:
> The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.
For me, this captures what's special about the Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol class of models. If you can reduce a problem to a clearly verifiable end state, provide the necessary context, and equip a model with the necessary tools it can usually get to a good solution.
Reducing problems to that state and designing that environment remains a skill, and one that I expect we will be paid handsomely for.
> If you can build a verification system and give proper direction,
That's called programming. The Bun tests are the result of years of programming. If you have to spend years programming an oracle before, programming is not ended. This is not just the headline claim. They are also making the claim in the article. `What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction.`
I'd also note the $165,000 figure is cited for the 11 day sprint, but this has only been merged months later with both employees and agents hammering away at it. The true cost of this rewrite is likely in the millions.
There's also the quality angle. It's taken as a given that because Claude Code is using it in production, it must be quality software. This couldn't be further from the truth. Claude Code is absolute dogshit software that nobody in their right mind would even consider using if Claude didn't gatekeep their subscription subsidy token rates behind it. It is the absolute worst of any possible harness that anybody uses seriously.
Don't get me wrong, this is impressive in some degree. It is a genuine feat of software engineering to have written a class of programs that can generate other programs of this scale. But the claims of its relevance and impact are wildly, wildly overstated. Note also the exponential growth in Github commits, and yet there is not a single piece of non-LLM related, LLM-generated software that I use, or that I have felt has improved as a result. There is no massively popular new software that regular end consumers are using, just a bunch of .md file wrappers for certain types of developers to wank over. To the contrary, software in general appears to be degrading even more rapidly than it already was, with major Windows issues, Github issues, outrageous security breaches [as a result of woefully incompetent security practices rather than amazingly competent offensive practices], etc. becoming more and more common.
On the other hand, if you're working in an industry where you and your coworkers are developing novel solutions that aren't widely known, chances are you'll still be doing that by hand with some light LLM automation. There are industries with a lot of gatekept secrets where LLMs will be less useful. What I will say on that matter is this: if you weren't surprised frontier labs stole copyrighted work for training data, you'd do well to mind what you push through their systems.
Our SaaS company is making plans to move towards bespoke development, which until now has been far too costly for most customers to accept. It also violates the multi-tenant cost/business model, so we're scrambling to figure out what hosting and ops and support agreements look like in a bespoke future.
The implications here go well beyond development. I'm seeing pretty massive changes happening in finance, consulting, HR, accounting, law, design, architecture, health, and everything else. When the value of intelligence is effectively zero, how are humans supposed to market and sell themselves in the job market? Some white collar people might try to move into physical jobs for job security, but it will only take a fraction of white collar workers to migrate to crater wages there too.
We're not ready for this. Socially, economically, and politically. Look at how we treated middle Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs when they were offshored to China. Hillary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." We'll watch jobs and industries disappear while clinging to our own and praying that it's not us today.
UBI is going to be inevitable soon, but it's also woefully insufficient. Giving a developer who used to earn $100k $20k per year UBI isn't going to placate their white hot rage at the social contract being broken. We're going to need universal high income, and paying for that is going to be such a radical social change that I worry voters won't accept it until things are dire.
If you discard coding purity questions like style, architecture, cleanliness - the stuff they come out with is buggy & error prone.
The problems seems architectural - in that context windows are limited and you need more compute to increase them, married with the fact the models are really over confident. But if you do increase them it causes mode collapse. Yann LeCun has a really good graphic in his slides of a circle (all possible answers) and a red line coming from the centre depicting a path in the circle that at some point chose the wrong token and continued on to an incorrect conclusion. How do you actually fix that? I don't think it's possible.
I've had so many times in my day job someone has told me (Claude told them) there is a bug in my code, I look at it and nope - it just didn't look up the right file. Then you push back on it and it completely crumbles and says sorry.
I wouldn't keep an employee hired who did that over and over again and never learned
New versions ship daily and I seem to hit brand new issues every day. They disappear after a few more updates, but it's damn annoying to keep up instead of doing work, and the direction of changes is lacking at best. The underlying technology otherwise seems nothing short of a miracle, but the contrast is eye-opening.
In industries where this is acceptable, that's the future. In ones that can't tolerate it, it isn't. I hadn't expected software engineering itself to be one of the former but it's kinda obvious in retrospective.
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...
OK, I think I'm going to bow out of these discussions. Clearly I'm not as into tech as I though I was.
It's a highly paid, in demand career path where formal education is optional.
They came for the sysadmins first because they had more power, but they were always coming for you.
Even if "Agentic Coding" doesn't solve programming, there is an aligned incentive not to care, I've heard directly from the executives at large companies that they despise the amount of leverage software programmers have... and now they have an excuse to end it on a unified front.
That is sufficed to say that many people in our profession don't actually care about software development or programming, they just saw a lucrative career path.
My personal and somewhat bitter opinion is that the profession will be more enjoyable for me once all the people who are only in it for money leave. I can live a blue collar salary life working in tech and still enjoy it. Maybe I'll have less scrum masters and shit. Thank god.
My personal take is that the AI era will be a rough brush that will help shed all the accumulated cruft in this profession.
I think highly technical, knowledgable people will remain, and thrive in a few years, and all the rest will move on to the next fad, or whatever pays the most.
The reason a segment of the current market will remain is because LLMs still need steering, we are not at a point where an abstract idea can go from Tweet to product, and we are many many leagues away from that. Of course, this has been noted to oblivion before, so I'm not really providing shocker value at all here.
I essentially have the opposite opinion, you're going to lose people who had a lot of passion and be left with people who are content writing prompts for money.
Loud with lots of smoke, but didn't go anywhere!