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Media Programming SourceForge

Interview with Programmer Steve Yegge On the Future of AI Coding (sourceforge.net) 14

Posted by BeauHD from the don't-be-stubborn dept.
I had the opportunity to interview esteemed programmer Steve Yegge for the SourceForge Podcast to ask him all about AI-powered coding assistants and the future of programming. "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code," said Yegge. "That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry."

Steve has nearly 30 years of programming experience working at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab and now SourceGraph, working to build out the Cody AI assistant platform. Here's his Wikipedia page. He's not shy about sharing his opinions or predictions for the industry, no matter how difficult it may be for some to hear. "I'm going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we've done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years."

You can watch the episode on YouTube and stream on all major podcast platforms. A transcription of the podcast is available here.

Interview with Programmer Steve Yegge On the Future of AI Coding More | Reply

Interview with Programmer Steve Yegge On the Future of AI Coding

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  • I'd argue same problem exists... (Score:3)

    by OneOfMany07 ( 4921667 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @04:47PM (#64928893)

    Can't have an effective conversation without precise terminology. And that same terminology was what held back inexperienced people from getting what they wanted from previous internet searches (against forum posts, etc).

    Both knowing what can be easily done, and what to call that, are both very important to any software changes... with or without AI. Best case AI will eventually be able to translate paragraphs of talking around something into the actual thing, but that's just doing the PM's work too (translating requirements from the business owner).

    • It's neat that AI will be able to code in five years, since the AI we have now sure can't.

    • Can't have an effective conversation without precise terminology. And that same terminology was what held back inexperienced people from getting what they wanted from previous internet searches (against forum posts, etc).

      I'd go much, much further deeper than that.
      Computer interactions (in order to create something using them as tools, not just using them for entertainment) require discipline. This applies to most, if not all types of work, from drawing something to creating the next operating system. Anyone can "use", say, MS Paint, at its basic level. Click this, drag that, and you get a very basic drawing. But if you want to be proficient with it, you need to develop certain skills.

      Coding with help of LLMs is no different

    • Never-mind that even if you could just ask the AI to do it, you'd not have a job in doing so nor would there be a "programming" industry. It would just be a prompt that some office assistant or Project Manager dumped the requirements into as part of their other duties. There wouldn't be a special paid position to just input a prompt into a computer, like the C-Levels keep claiming there will be, because that would be seen as an unnecessary expense to be cut.

  • If this guy thinks that, he's not really a programmer. Also, "assembly language" did not go away. He's obviously not worked as a programmer on the 80% of programming jobs.

    But hey, who can tell the difference when "people who are just getting into the industry" call themselves programmers but don't know programming and will be incapable of knowing whether AI generated code works or not.

    What a society we live in where the most important things to repeat lies over and over.

  • "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code,"

    No. We're not. That's not a thing LLMs can actually do. They seem like they're having a conversation because each piece of text seems like it should flow from the previous text, but it's not actually a conversation in the sense that it has an idea, and your replies affect and change that idea. There's no dialectic to it. It's just responsive to a rollin

  • Imagine if everyone could write their own software. The days of this stupid shit where EULA's and regulation stop people from protecting themselves against anti-competitive software companies. All the shit they do like phone home routines, and those coupled with stuff like pinned certificates that prevent you from seeing what traffic companies are sending about you from software that is on your machine. Imagine when EULA's that are restrictive and prevent you from doing the things you want to do are all irr

  • I checked his LinkedIn account, he's one of my 3rd-degree connections. Hot dog! Maybe one day I'll graduate to being a 2nd-degree connection!

  • We can all see the vision of being able to just "talk to" the AI when creating code. It's tantalizingly close, we can almost taste it. I mean, if they'd just fix those pesky little glitches, where it pastes a bunch of HTML tags in the middle of my javascript, or adds a new function definition inside of the function I'm working on. Then we'd be there, right?

    Not so fast. Getting AI assistants to the point that they can be a big help with productivity is great, and that's already happening, but you've still go

  • Is not who or what writes the code. The real question is who debugs it.

    In my 30+ years of coding experience I found that debugging someone else's code normally takes longer than it would if I just wrote it and debugged it myself.

  • I don't do this "line oriented coding". I _design_ things, as algorithms, and then I translate that to code. Having an AI would not save time, because to tell the AI what I want, I would have to describe the algorithm. But that's when I am normally almost done anyway.

    I can only see it being useful if, say, the algorithm contained some steps that can be summarized, such as, "Extract data from excel into a set of MySQL tables". If an AI can do that, it would save me time.

    One thing I _don't_ do it code by tria

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