Originally the word computer described a person doing the act of computation.

I believe in the future, we're going to see a similar shift in "programmer" - instead of a human programming the computer, you'll give the ai an idea and it will spit out a program.

And just like how automating the act of computation revolutionized what we could compute, automating the act of writing code will change the act of programming - hopefully, as you described, allowing us to do things that simply were not practical in the past.

I was about to comment the same.

People wrote many books about software engineering, all from valuable experience from buildng expensive software systems. But in the age of AI, is there still anything learnable from generated code?

Personally I always ask AI to summarize its findings and lessons in a .md file. And I always learn something from it.

But could AI utilize some new patterns and paradigms I wasn't aware of? Very likely. Because we only learn from our personal grave mistakes, a summary from others gets neglected and forgotten

> same could be said of Software

Sort of. An elegant proof is useful beyond what it shows. It hints at new mathematics, and can prompt discovery in applied fields. I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

I think this happens all the time actually, but it's often smaller scale. Like someone writes a neat architecture to do X at their company, and later someone else walks in, looks at this code and sees it's now super easy to do Y, which then turns out to have immense user/business value.

> elegant code

Usually it's the opposite. "That's in prod? And it works? It shouldn't work and I thought it was doing something else. Why does it work?"

But it has. Think of design patterns and other programming paradigms (logic programming, functional programming, etc).

you must not be familiar with haskell

> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.

Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.

> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

Every software design pattern came from elegant code. People wrote code, summarize code, learnt from code, and taught code. That's discovery

I do agree with you, although I think that there may be still some advancement available in software in terms of programming languages or novel architecture design. But frontier is much more around hardware, just thinking about computing power, electrical transmission, material constraints on power, connectivity, insulation. I would definitely advise kids to study physics and materials engineering than CS.

I mean if we're being honest, most of CS studying (as practiced) was a waste of time anyway.

The S fell short in actual reality for the most part, as it was merely a hiring requirement. A hiring requirement that didn't even make sense, because the skillset of academic CS only marginally overlaps with the skillset one wants to hire for.

Material engineering at least for the most part has actual real-world applications where one can push humanity further. CS (as practiced, not necessarily the idea of real CS but the CS we got due to it being used as a hiring filter) for the most part is just self-referential spinning with mostly unclear results.

There is real impressive work being done in that field, of course, but I'd argue that the majority of it over the last decade or so at least was just performative nonsense.

Maybe by again allocating new resources to other fields, what hides under the label CS can become more pure actual CS again. I think that would also be a much less miserable experience for everyone involved.

Models have limits too, I don't think software will become boring. I think it'll become more interesting, in the not so distant future one software engineer will be able to do so much more than today.

What new things are even left to discover in software? You can still use C for all the backend stuff and I don’t think all the endless stream of front end frameworks and libraries are all that innovative. I think the only tangible innovations we’ve made over the last few decades have been in infrastructure management. All heavy lifting is done by mathematics anyways.

> What new things are even left to discover in software?

The will to implement the stuff we learned, instead of letting dark patterns and churn for the sake of churn get the better of that :P

Well i mean, the whole idea of discovery is that you're not sure what you will discover until you do

But these days hardware is software. One microcontroller replaces so much electronics. Software is eating the world, as the man said.