alt Hacker NewsProgramming has changed. Agentic coding, where I go back and forth with the AI to generste a spec along with tooling and exit criteria, and then the AI goes off for hour(s) (possibly helped by harness/tooling like Ralph Wiggum), and then do the same thing for a different spec/feature/bug fix and the AI goes off and does that. Repeat until out of tokens. That was previously not how programming went.
We can quibble as to how much that is or is not "programming", but on a post about Claude code, what's relevant is that's how things are today. How much code review is done after the AI agent stops churning is relevant to the question of code quality out the other end, but to the question at hand, "has programming changed", either has, or what I'm doing is no longer programming. The semantics are less interesting to me, the point is, when I sit down at my computer to make code happen so I can deliver software to customers, the very nature of what I do has changed.
Long ago we abstracted programming into a logical language which allow us to think at a higher level. IMO LLMs are another abstraction but a bad one as it is stochastic and we can't guarantee output quality (e.g. security, performance, etc). The dream has always been to tell the computer what to do in a simple language, and the challenge has always been finding out that we didn't even know what we wanted the computer to do. LLMs might help in the first one but not in the latter. At the end, human intelligence cannot be outsourced.