this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
They won't understand how they did so much with so little. You're all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.
My first actual real life project was building a data analytics platform while keeping the budget to a minimum. With some clever parallelism and aggressive memory usage optimisation I made it work on a single lowest-tier Azure VM, costing like $50 to run monthly, while the measurable savings for the business from using the platform are now measured in the millions.
Don Knuth didn't write all those volumes on how software is an art for you to use fucking Node.JS you rubes, you absolute clowns
@DarkCloud @dgerard
The first commercial product I worked on had 128 bytes of RAM and 2048 bytes of ROM.
It kept people safe from low oxygen, risk of explosions, and toxic levels of two poisonous gases including short term and long term effects at fifteen minutes and eight hour averages.
Pre-Internet. When you're doing something new or pushing the limits, you just have to know how to code and read the datasheets.
Nah, we're plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.
Please, by all means, keep it up.
You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I'm increasingly disconcerted by the rise of "devops" who can't actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.
There's a lot of
rm . -rfin your future.This is dead on! 99% of the fucking job is digital plumbing so the whole thing doesn't blow the up when (a) there's a slight deviation from the "ideal" data you were expecting, or (b) the stakeholders wanna make changes at the last minute to a part of the app that seems benign but is actually the crumbling bedrock this entire legacy monstrosity was built upon. Both scenarios are equally likely.
I doubt it'll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.
Meh, I have so many bangers laughing at actual AI bros that I could make my CV just all be sneers on them, I think this particular corner of the internet is quite safe
I think most people will ultimately associate chatbots with corporate overreach rather rank-and-file programmers. It's not like decades of Microsoft shoving stuff down our collective throat made people think particularly less of programmers, or think about them at all.
Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.
Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We're already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.
NASA programmers grow more powerful by the day. It’s only a matter of time before they reach AGI