zlacker

>>strayd+(OP)
>The people really leading AI coding right now (and I’d put myself near the front, though not all the way there) don’t read code. They manage the things that produce code.

I can’t imagine any other example where people voluntarily move for a black box approach.

Imagine taking a picture on autoshot mode and refusing to look at it. If the client doesn’t like it because it’s too bright, tweak the settings and shoot again, but never look at the output.

What is the logic here? Because if you can read code, I can’t imagine poking the result with black box testing being faster.

Are these people just handing off the review process to others? Are they unable to read code and hiding it? Why would you handicap yourself this way?

>>kace91+Ek
I think many people are missing the overall meaning of these sorts of posts.. that is they are describing a new type of programmer that will only use agents and never read the underlying code. These vibe/agent coders will use natural(-ish) language to communicate with the agents and wouldn't look at the code anymore than, say, a PHP developer would look at the underlying assembly. It is not the level of abstraction they are working on. There are many use cases where this type of coding will work fine and it will let many people who previously couldn't really take advantage of computers to do so. This is great but in no way will do anything to replace the need for code that requires humans to understand (which, in turn, requires participation in the writing).

>>eikenb+dz
Your analogy to PHP developers not reading assembly got me thinking.

Early resistance to high-level (i.e. compiled) languages came from assembly programmers who couldn’t imagine that the compiler could generate code that was just as performant as their hand-crafted product. For a while they were right, but improved compiler design and the relentless performance increases in hardware made it so that even an extra 10-20% boost you might get from perfectly hand-crafted assembly was almost never worth the developer time.

There is an obvious parallel here, but it’s not quite the same. The high-level language is effectively a formal spec for the abstract machine which is faithfully translated by the (hopefully bug-free) compiler. Natural language is not a formal spec for anything, and LLM-based agents are not formally verifiable software. So the tradeoffs involved are not only about developer time vs. performance, but also correctness.

>>jkhdig+RC
Imagine if high level coding worked like: write a first draft, and get assembly. All subsequent high level code is written in a repl and expresses changes to the assembly, or queries the state of the assembly, and is then discarded. only the assembly is checked into version control.

>>Quadma+9L
Or the opposite, all applications are just text files with prompts in them and the assembly lives as ravioli in many temp files. It only builds the code that is used. You can extend the prompt while using the application.