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GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

(www.techinasia.com)
358 points andrewstetsenko | 2 comments | 23 Jun 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.476s | source
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agentultra ◴[23 Jun 25 22:06 UTC] No.44360677[source]▶
… because programming languages are the right level of precision for specifying a program you want. Natural language isn’t it. Of course you need to review and edit what it generates. Of course it’s often easier to make the change yourself instead of describing how to make the change.

I wonder if the independent studies that show Copilot increasing the rate of errors in software have anything to do with this less bold attitude. Most people selling AI are predicting the obsolescence of human authors.

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1. al_borland ◴[24 Jun 25 09:37 UTC] No.44364351[source]▶
I wasn’t in the industry to see it first hand, but was this same criticism levied against higher level languages when they first hit the scene? Something to the effect of high level languages not being the right level of precision, because the programmer wanted to directly manipulate what was happening in memory, and the high level languages are not the right level of precision for that?

The issue with natural language isn’t that it’s impossible to be precise, it’s that most people aren’t, or they are precise about what they want it to do for them, but not what the computer needs to do to make it happen. This leads to a lot of guessing by engineerings as they try to translate the business requirements into code. Now the LLM is doing that guessing, often with less context about the broader business objectives, or an understanding of the people writing those requirements.

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2. agentultra ◴[24 Jun 25 12:32 UTC] No.44365476[source]▶
> was this same criticism levied against higher level languages when they first hit the scene?

No.

Some were concerned that the output of compilers couldn’t match the quality of what could be done by a competent programmer at the time. That was true for a time. Then compilers got better.

Nobody was concerned that compilers were going to be used by capitalists to lay them off and seize the means of producing programs by turning it into property.