Comment by wrs

Comment by wrs 12 days ago

I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career. Like every other such technology, I recommend that you engage with it, understand it, relate that experience to what your employer does, and be the voice of knowledgeable pragmatism about where to use it. In other words, be an engineer.

If that can’t be done where you are, or isn’t valued, you’re in the wrong place.

I’ve been through this with (including but not limited to) PCs, OOP, client-server, SOA, XML, NoSQL, blockchain, “big data”, and indeed, multiple definitions of “AI”. Turns out all but one of those were actually somewhat useful in the end, when applied properly, but they didn’t eliminate the industry. Just roll with it.

xtracto 12 days ago

Reminds me when Rational Rose and UML were briefly famous in the late 90s. What an absolute piece of crap that the suits pushed to use.

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alfiedotwtf 12 days ago

I remember at the time that Rational Rose was going to allow non-programmers to make apps…
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes

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- CamperBob2 11 days ago
  
  This time is different.
  No, really. This time is different.
  
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RaftPeople 11 days ago

> I’ve been through this with (including but not limited to) PCs, OOP, client-server, SOA, XML, NoSQL, blockchain, “big data”, and indeed, multiple definitions of “AI”. Turns out all but one of those were actually somewhat useful in the end, when applied properly, but they didn’t eliminate the industry. Just roll with it.

My non-technical boss was excited about some silver-bullet tech and I had to walk him through how these things play out.

I talked through most of the industry's overhyped "trends" since the 70's and describe the promise and the reality (very similar to your list).

I did mention that there were 2 trends that had more lasting general application (compared to things that were just another tool in the toolbox used for some situations):

1-Relational databases

2-Internet

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edanm 11 days ago

> I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career.

While this has some truth, the size of the current "revolution" makes all the others look tiny, especially in terms of how it affects a programmer's day job. Nor did most of those "revolutions" affect every field of programming at once, like this one does. The percent of programmers actually impacted by blockchain is probably in the low single-digits. The percent of programmers using some version of AI tooling 3 years into this is probably >50%, and the more impactful tools will be used more very soon is my gues.

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wrs 11 days ago

Were you around for the OOP craze? It definitely affected a lot of peoples’ day job. I mean, quite a few people use C++ and Java, no?
In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers, and had similar top-down edicts from the C-suite, e.g., declaring you must be “all-in on cloud”. Turns out those things were indeed quite transformative, but now that the hype has dissipated somewhat, we’ve absorbed them into the toolkit and just proceed with the engineering.

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- edanm 11 days ago
  
  I've been programming professionally since around 2003. I'd say I caught the late-stages OOP craze (or maybe after-craze) though not really the origin or rise of OOP. My first job was in a C++ codebase, and I spent a lot of time learning the OOP design patterns (or really, the "how do we make C++ behave well" patterns).
  That said, the rise of OOP is probably measured in a decade or two. It eventually "spawned" whole new programming languages, that eventually got a lot of popularity. But this is over a much longer time-frame than how quickly we went from no such thing as AI coding, to (now) coding agents. It also didn't affect the entire industry in the same way - hell, some people were still writing assembly in the 80s as the OOP craze was winding up. I don't have actual stats, but I imagine coding agents are far more ubiquitious across far more industries/languages/stacks, for more quickly.
  > In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers,
  The internet (or maybe the web) I'd say was probably the more transformative thing. Cloud affected a lot of things too but not quite as much and didn't make quite as big a difference to the day-to-day work. I deployed things pre-cloud and post-cloud (though honestly mostly during the early-stage cloud), and there wasn't such a big difference.
  Look, at the end of the day you can't just compare AI to other technologies blindly and say "well they were big hypes, this is the same". By actually looking at what it's doing and how it's affecting things, it's fairly clear it has a much bigger impact on the day-to-day work of programming, as opposed to anything else you mentioned.
  I'm not saying this is the end of development, for all I know this will mean more developers! But I think software development will look fundamentally different in 5 years in a way that is far more widespread than in any other of these changes.
  
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  wrs 11 days ago
  
  I’m not comparing anything blindly; that is in fact the exact opposite of my advice. Nor am I saying all big hypes are equivalent, just that there’s always a big hype about something, and you need a strategy to stay levelheaded about them despite the irrational polarized yelling you hear.
  I use LLMs every day in my work (both to help write code and as a component of the thing I’m coding). They’re pretty cool. But as an engineer you need to make decisions based on what they actually do, in your empirical observation, not what people tell you they will do, eventually, in their fantasies. Speculating about that is just noise. The engineer’s job is to find the signal.
  In my observation, I can trust an LLM to write code way more than last year, but I still have to keep it on a very short leash. Will it be better next year? I don’t know. Nobody does.
  
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  edanm 10 days ago
  
  Yes, agreed on basically everything.
  
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- RaftPeople 11 days ago
  
  > Were you around for the OOP craze?
  In the early 90's I was working for a large ERP company that went all in on OOP and distributed objects.
  I was talking to one of the guys from the new team they created to re-write the entire system and had an entertaining conversation:
  Tech guy that had drunk the kool-aid (TGTHDTKA): "...and the objects can just automatically interact with each other, like I can drop this person object on the phone object and it just automatically makes the phone call to that person"
  Me: "Uh, but you still had to write specific code that causes that interaction to occur, you can't just do that with objects that haven't agreed on how to communicate"
  TGTHDTKA: "No, it's all automatic because a person has a phone number and a phone uses a phone number to make calls, so you don't have to code anything special"
  etc.
  
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  wrs 11 days ago
  
  Now the MCP kool-aid is about how we’re finally going to make that work, because the computer on either end can literally read the field descriptions and intuit the interaction. MCP uses LLMs to supply the magic that the WSDL folks never admitted was necessary.
  
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