AI coding and the peanut butter and jelly problem

If you do have that skill to communicate clearly and describe the requirements of a novel problem, why is the AI still useful? Actually writing the code should be relatively trivial from there. If it isn't, that points to a problem with your tools/architecture/etc. Programmers IMX are, on average, far too tolerant of boilerplate.

If the LLM gets something wrong, you have to be more exact to get it to make the program do the thing you want. And when that isn’t perfect, you have to tell it exactly what you want to to do in THAT situation. And the next one. And the next one.

At that point you’re programming. It may not be the same as coding in a traditional language, but isn’t it effectively the same process? You’re having to lay out all the exact steps to take when different things happen.

So in the end have you replaced programmers or decreased the amount of programming needed? Or have you just changed the shape of the activity so it doesn’t look like what we’re used to calling programming today?

John Siracusa (one of the hosts) compared it to the idea of a fourth generation language.

From Wikipedia:

“The concept of 4GL was developed from the 1970s through the 1990s, overlapping most of the development of 3GL, with 4GLs identified as ‘non-procedural’ or ‘program-generating’ languages”.

Program generating language sounds an awful lot like what people are trying to use AI for. And these claims that we don’t need programmers anymore also sound a lot like the claims from when people were trying to make flowchart based languages. Or COBOL.

“You don’t need programmers! The managers can write their own reports”.

In fact “the term 4GL was first used formally by James Martin in his 1981 book Application Development Without Programmers” (Wikipedia again).

They keep trying. But it all ends up still being programming.