An Obituary for Programming
Jeremy Scheff discusses the loss caused by coding agents for programmers. He states that programming was once considered one of the greatest jobs.
Summary: Jeremy Scheff discusses the loss caused by coding agents for programmers. He states that programming was once considered one of the greatest jobs.
This article offers a perspective on the future of programming as AI-powered coding agents rise. It primarily expresses concern that the “puzzle-solving” enjoyment in code development might diminish with these tools. This represents a significant shift, especially for engineers who dedicated their careers to the intellectual satisfaction of writing code.
Technically, AI coding agents are systems capable of taking natural language input and generating functional code snippets. These agents are trained on large language models (LLMs) and extensive codebases, enabling them to generate boilerplate code, debug, and even suggest complex algorithms. The developer’s role might shift from direct code writing to providing precise instructions to these agents and integrating the generated code.
From an infrastructure and operational standpoint, these tools can accelerate development cycles and enable more code production with less human effort. However, issues like the quality of generated code, security vulnerabilities, and maintenance costs become critically important. Testing automatically generated code, integrating it into CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring its runtime performance will introduce new challenges.
As engineers, we should view these tools not just as code generators but as assistants that can help us in designing and architecting complex systems. Our focus should be on efficiently utilizing these tools and understanding the system-wide implications of the generated code.
🔗 Source: Simon Willison Weblog
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