During my jog today, I listened to the New York Times Magazine article Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It. Read by James Patrick Cronin, it was an engaging 38-minute story about how coding evolved, from writing assembly to prompting Claude Code. Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers, some optimistic, and some worried that A.I. is atomizing the work force.
Don’t get uppity at work — we could replace you with a bot.
I feel that A.I., as we know it, would forever change not only how software is to be developed, but also how computer science talent is to be educated. Fewer students will have any software development experience beyond prompting an A.I. agent, and when something is not optimally designed or breaks, no one will be able to fix them by hand.
How to win a best paper award, written by Nicholas Carlini, is worth a quick read. Most of the ideas here were great, for example:
The majority of my papers that have received best paper awards were rejected at least once before they got in. In one case, a paper of mine was rejected four times first.
And also:
Once you’ve read everything, the second step is to forget it all. The reason is simple: everything that’s already been done has already been done. If you constrain yourself to thinking only about what’s been done, you’ll never come up with something clever and new.
In a similar spirit, I recall Professor Jane W.S. Liu once said to her Ph.D. students: “Do not read more than 15 papers in your Ph.D. — you want to become a world-class researcher, not a mediocre one.”
If I were to briefly summarize the best writing advice I’ve received, it would be to listen to how your writing sounds spoken out loud, and try to make it understandable. I used to do this by reading my papers out loud to force myself to hear every word; I still do this sometimes, but now I also use text-to-speech systems to read the words back to me. You’ll notice things you’d never have caught yourself.
This reminds me of the NSF panel summary sessions, where panelists are required to read their panel summaries out loud to the entire panel. Apparently, many issues in writing can be caught by just listening to spoken words.
But some of the other ideas seem to be quite dated in the A.I. era. For example, one doesn’t really need to proofread the work — the agents will gladly take over the job. Conducting many experiments are no longer harder than conducting a few: the agents will automatically conduct these for you.