Will AI Bring 'the End of Computer Programming As We Know It'? (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0180987440
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/03/14/2137238/will-ai-bring-the-end-of-computer-programming-as-we-know-it
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TFA.JuvB.P-MSK-ymmFUc&smid=url-share
" [6]Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It ."
Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine , the article even cites [7]long-time [8]programming [9]guru [10]Kent Beck saying LLMs got him going again and he's now finishing more projects than ever, calling AI's unpredictability "addictive, in a slot-machine way."
In fact, the article concludes "many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird..."
> Brennan-Burke chimed in: "You remember seeing the research that showed the more rude you were to models, the better they performed?" They chuckled. Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots... For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job... A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker... Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating...
>
> If you want to put a number on how much more productive A.I. is making the programmers at mature tech firms like Google, it's 10 percent, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, has said. That's the bump that Google has seen in "engineering velocity" — how much faster its more than 100,000 software developers are able to work. And that 10 percent is the average inside the company, Ryan Salva, a senior director of product at the company, told me. Some work, like writing a simple test, is now tens of times faster. Major changes are slower. At the start-ups whose founders I spoke to, closer to 100 percent of their code is being written by A.I., but at Google it is not quite 50 percent.
The article cites a senior principal engineer at Amazon who says "Things I've always wanted to do now only take a six-minute conversation and a 'Go do that." Another programmer described their army of Claude agents as "an alien intelligence that we're learning to work with." Although "A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire," the article acknowledges — and after relying on AI, "Some new developers told me they can feel their skills weakening."
Still, "I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines... "
> A few programmers did say that they lamented the demise of hand-crafting their work. "I believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that," one Apple engineer told me. (He asked to remain unnamed so he wouldn't get in trouble for criticizing Apple's embrace of A.I.) He went on: "I didn't do it to make a lot of money and to excel in the career ladder. I did it because it's my passion. I don't want to outsource that passion"... But only a few people at Apple openly share his dimmer views, he said.
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> The coders who still actively avoid A.I. may be in the minority, but their opposition is intense. Some dislike how much energy it takes to train and deploy the models, and others object to how they were trained by tech firms pillaging copyrighted works. There is suspicion that the sheer speed of A.I.'s output means firms will wind up with mountains of flabbily written code that won't perform well. The tech bosses might use agents as a cudgel: Don't get uppity at work — we could replace you with a bot. And critics think it is a terrible idea for developers to become reliant on A.I. produced by a small coterie of tech giants.
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> Thomas Ptacek, a Chicago-based developer and a co-founder of the tech firm Fly.io... thinks the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn't work well and that it can't work well... The holdouts are in the minority, and "you can watch the five stages of grief playing out."
"How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn't yet clear," the article concludes. "But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields... Abstraction may be coming for us all."
[1] https://games.slashdot.org/story/02/08/30/1254203/flash-games-as-political-commentary
[2] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/09/22/1822223/do-coders-crave-a-sense-of-control
[3] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/01/03/1736228/study-finds-brain-activity-of-coders-isnt-like-language-or-math
[4] https://slashdot.org/story/07/04/09/0649209/you-played-violent-games---why-cant-your-kids
[5] https://games.slashdot.org/story/06/08/15/1416245/the-game-design-of-survivor
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TFA.JuvB.P-MSK-ymmFUc&smid=url-share
[7] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/01/27/1631226/test-driven-development-by-example
[8] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/09/16/1333202/refactoring-improving-the-design-of-existing-code
[9] https://slashdot.org/story/01/04/05/1554205/is-uml-really-necessary
[10] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/21/097256/extreme-programming-explained
Yes, but... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Yes, it already has. Ultimately it speeds up boilerplate code, and reduces the need to read documentation to figure out how to do what you want. However it firmly places the onus on the programmer to accurately describe what he wants.
The idea of only needing a "six minute-conversation" is nonsense. If anything, more emphasis than ever must be placed on requirements and honing the specificity of those requirements. It still takes days or even weeks of planning if you're building a maintainable complex system
it's a tool (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a tool. You need to know how to use it. But before all, you need to know what you want it to do.
I don't "vibe code". I explicitly tell an LLM what's the output I want. This works great. It's also helped me take care of long-standing low-priority tickets.
For example, I had it rewrite a backend function that reads from DB/returns JSON. But I had it do it "streaming" from the database instead of buffering-and-stringifying the database response. This has been long in my to-do list. I knew how to implement it (as I had done it in the past). I just didn't want to do it because it was a "nice to have" but not a must for our use case. And it's honestly boring to write.
The LLM did it for me in a few minutes.
I also tried "Vibe coding an app" to see how that would work. It didn't. It shows awesome progress at the beginning and then it starts failing. It deletes entire files, rewrites unnecessary parts, keeps looping and burning through tokens so, I honestly don't know what the "vibe coders" are really doing. It just didn't give me any results when I tried it.
Re: (Score:1)
> I had it rewrite a backend function that reads from DB/returns JSON. But I had it do it "streaming" from the database instead of buffering-and-stringifying the database response. This has been long in my to-do list. I knew how to implement it (as I had done it in the past). I just didn't want to do it because it was a "nice to have" but not a must for our use case. And it's honestly boring to write.
I find I do a lot of refactors that I would have previously written off as good ideas, but too much work to be worth the effort. I still do think about the effort and weigh it against the benefit, but the effort I'm weighing is my time to review what the LLM did, and the time of whoever has to review my PR. On balance, though, I end up doing a lot of code cleanup that I previously wouldn't have done.
I do also have the LLM actually write most of my code, but first I discuss what I want with the LLM and a
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself. I barely trust my own code, much less code that an opaque AI generated that I consequently only half-understand.
With code I wrote myself, the way it works is a direct reflection of my own thought process, and by the time it's done, I've spent enough time writing and refining it that I'm intimately familiar with it and can tell you exactly what every line does
Re: (Score:2)
You're old and it shows. You value your tools and would not toss them on the floor when you're done. You value your work, and you take pride in it.
The thing is, right now you got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don't last. And your days are just about over. Now that's a hard motherfuckin' fact of life, but that's a fact of life your ass is gonna have to get realistic about. See, this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their skills would age li
There have been multiple End of Programming ... (Score:1)
> 'the End of Computer Programming As We Know It'?
Yes, but we've had many of those.
Compilers. Sure beats assembly.
IDE. Sure makes debugging easy.
Graphical layout. The IDE is going to generate working code based on the GUI elements I layout. Damn.
AI. Now I describe the GUI in natural language and it generates code. Even better. Wait, I don't need my old textbooks as reference anymore? The AI can tell me about these well known algorithms and generate code tailored to some details I provide? Wow.
Note the latter is all AI can really be trusted with. Dea
"now barely programming" (Score:2)
"the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn't work well and that it can't work well" and they sure are. AI code generation works very well indeed, the recent models are pretty incredible in my experience.
But I just plod along with an IDE and an integrated LLM chat panel to tell it what to do. Tell it to propose some solutions for my objectives, choose one to take a flyer at, have it write a phased implementation plan, walk it though the steps and smoke test it all along the way.
So much conflict (Score:2)
One second we have reports that it makes people less productive, next second they're more productive. Considering the engineers mentioned are everything from centre the div to making the ads load a ms faster I wonder if there's a bigger portion of the former seeing massive improvements over the latter. Well documented, numerous examples it's fast and mostly produces a good enough replication even if it tends to add way too many superfluous lines. Once you start getting away from the stuff on stack overflow
I'll post it again for what few people will percei (Score:2)
All technological revolutions have an S-curve structure.
They eventually peak in value and diminish...
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2025/09/1... [scry.llc]
The net result of the past two Kondratieff cycles was a net decrease in the workweek...
from 60 to 48 in the 1870s and 48 to 40 in the 1930s...
[2]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
The past four years of constant IT lsyoffs are a huge red flag
signifying structural change, not inventory adjustment of previous 1yr recessions.
[3]https://www.scry.llc/2014/05/1... [scry.llc]
The Kondratieff (credit) c
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2025/09/16/cost-of-information/
[2] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
[3] https://www.scry.llc/2014/05/15/the-vertical-web/
Churches in the late 1800s (Score:2)
were the peak of handcrafted excellence by builders with decades of experience.
by 1930, all churches were built with machine-cut bricks and mechanical effort.
the Era of handcrafted software is ending, just as masonry did.
adapt or die.
sure (Score:1)
pretty soon there will be so much code generated, that nobody will be able to make sense of it, especially when it stops working.
a high heaven for all hackers.
Re: (Score:1)
AI will indirectly end humanity in the next two years (through bad decisions with military AI, on either side), so, indirectly, yes it will end computer programming as we know it...
Re: (Score:1)
we can only hope, but i doubt the humanity will fall that easily at this stage of the "ai".
Re: sure (Score:2)
There's certainly a risk of people causing the fall given the lack of understanding of AI limitations. AI itself won't do it but it'll certainly help convince some idiot that it's a good idea...
Re: sure (Score:2)
Add to it that new generations of AI might fail to maintain old code.
Re: (Score:2)
Code maintenance will almost certainly suffer, but think of the epic log messages with all those emoticons in them coming up on your thin client.