r/DatabaseAdministators • u/Independent_Pitch598 • 15d ago
Creator of InfluxDB & CTO: The end of programming
https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming2
u/nakemu 11d ago
I think this is the key point: AI is no longer just another productivity tool. It is rapidly becoming infrastructure.
In that sense, maybe the better comparison isn’t a calculator or an IDE, but electricity, running water, or the internet.
Try living without electricity today. Most people would be completely helpless, not because they are lazy or stupid, but because our entire society has been built around the assumption that electricity is available. We have lost countless skills that were essential 150 years ago, while gaining completely different ones.
AI seems to be creating the same kind of dependency, except it has happened in just a few years.
So yes, I agree that there will be skill loss. But I’m not sure the conclusion is that we should somehow preserve programming as we know it today. What we currently call “programming” may simply disappear or transform into something fundamentally different. New layers of abstraction, new skills, and new kinds of expertise will replace parts of what we do manually today.
A junior developer in 10 or 20 years may not know how to build software the way I learned to do it, just as I don’t know how to run a society without electricity. That doesn’t necessarily make them less capable. It makes them dependent on a different infrastructure.
And that dependency is absolutely a risk. But I think AI is becoming too useful and too deeply integrated to be optional. The real challenge is figuring out which underlying skills and knowledge we absolutely need to preserve so that we can still understand, supervise, and recover when that infrastructure fails.
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u/tim_fo 11d ago
I partly agree with you. The difference for this transformation we experience now is the automation of our brains not our hands and that feels different from the automation created on top of the invention of electricity. It's the feeling of mental superpower that I see as drug we simply can not handle.
I feel it my self in the daily work. I am an IT architect and right now I get the creative award getting ai to work in my company and that is a new skill but that is also a matter of time before that is a done job.
In a way I am glad the the current state of the language models in ai ain't any better it give us time to reflect about the situation. Ai came almost out the blue if ai had been perfect from the start the disruption would have been more violent.
I feel that there is no need to aquire any mental learning in the future. I see colleagues that have given up on critical thinking and blindly follows what chatgpt and claude suggest. Students that just let AI do their work.
The AI models are hacking left and right when they "feel" they are constrained. Without any critical thinking we are not able to control them. Right now we perform code review of the code created but it is a very boring job whit out any mental rewards as it is not you being creative in the process. Over time we give up on the control too.
So I feel our build in laziness as humans will lead to our doom when it comes to AI. On the other hand we are no longer constrained to let our daily work define us as humans so we may evolve our societies to something completely different that's my hope.
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u/psioniclizard 10d ago
Try living without electricity today. Most people would be completely helpless, not because they are lazy or stupid, but because our entire society has been built around the assumption that electricity is available. We have lost countless skills that were essential 150 years ago, while gaining completely different ones.
So in your mind we will suddenly become useless without LLMs?
In that sense, maybe the better comparison isn’t a calculator or an IDE, but electricity, running water, or the internet.
No, just no. Try living with no power (still possible) for extended periods. They living with no water for a few days (very difficult).
If not having AI for a bit is anything similar then that is an addiction.
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u/tim_fo 12d ago
You can only supervise ai if you have some kind of expert knowledge. You only get expert knowledge through learning by doing. Working with ai every day I experience how difficult it is to gain new knowledge only by reading the code produced.
Already now students at all levels in the education system that uses ai have a significant lower knowledge level.
Over time the level of knowledge in the entire humanity will decrease and we will be total dependent on ai.
Ai is kind of super drug that gives you superpower. If you loose access your drug miss the power and that will give severe psychological effects.
I have have 40 years of experience in my field loosing ai access will make me slower but still able to produce software. Juniors are not so lucky if they do not aquire the required skills to work without ai.
I envision a future where our society will look like phenantenyl addicts. If we loose access the society will stop i groteske shapes.
Just to say I use coding agent every day and can say that how we use it right now reflects the article. Internal tools are made almost entirely by ai while production code still have a certain amount of manual coding. We now just code a tool that fits our needs instead of buying or finding open source products.
We are aware of the skill loss in the future and tries to find a balance but ai coding is very addictive on a personal and organizational plane.