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points by archagon 1 day ago | 0 comments
AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.
[–] SR2Z 1 day ago
Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.

In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.

How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.

[–] archagon 22 hours ago
Oh, well, I guess the managers at my last job were secretly "programmers" who were simply farther up the stack — all the way up to the CEO, evidently the greatest programmer of them all.
[–] SR2Z 11 hours ago
Some CEOs are engineering leaders. Some are not. The difference IMO will matter more and more as LLMs infiltrate deeper.
[–] shepherdjerred 1 day ago
AI is an abstraction in the same way throwing a task to a junior engineer is
[–] b112 1 day ago
I think you mean "shouldn't be", because I see many using as if it is.