Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
600 points (96.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
23200 readers
456 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.
You should click the link.
Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂
Yeah but it's different this time!
I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.
Quality work will always need human craftsmanship
I'd wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)
It's tricky, because there's no hard definition for what it means to "change the world", either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn't possible before, and is also reliably useful.
To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn't really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn't seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.
These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it's infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.
Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think AI will definitively have an impact in how shit is done, but propably not the way AI bros think. It might not revolutionize the world, but become and standard.
I don't know enough about AI or about the entire IT world so I cannot 100% affirm or deny anything, though.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'd love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech
I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?
/edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.
I'm surprised there's not low-code/no-code in that list.
"We're gonna make a fully functioning e-commerce website with only this WYSIWYG site builder. See? No need to hire any devs!"
Several months later...
"Well that was a complete waste of time."
load more comments
(2 replies)
Remember when "The Cloud" was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?
I don't think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it's a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yeah, AI is going to put some people out of work, but in turn will open lots of more specialized positions. And these positions that are lost could adapt to AI (for example, being part of the training instead of just being let go).
There is still difference.
Cloud was FOR the IT people. Machine learning is for predicting patterns following data.
Maybe stock predictors will adapt or replace but average programmer didn't have to switch to replit because it's "cloud IDE"
I mean, isn't that what "get on or get left behind" means?
It does not necessarily mean you'll lose your job. Nor does "get on" mean you have to become a specialist on it.
The post picks specifically on things that didn't catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.
Yeah, I realized it suffers from (inverse) survivorship bias, only pointing out the ones that didn't survive.
Didn't one company claim something like "the internet is a fad" or "touchscreen phones are a fad" and went bankrupt/became irrelevant because they didn't adapt?
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.
Yes, I would like to book the $5000 Silverlight course, please.
glorified autocomplete
Which is honestly its best use case. That and occasionally asking it to generate a one-liner for a library call I don't feel like looking up. Any significant generation tends to go off the rails fast.
Getting it to format documentation for you seems to work a treat. Nothing too complex, just "move this bit here, split that into points".
You sir haven't railed an entire ui out of your vibes up asshole
load more comments
(2 replies)
I use it to find easy to miss errors.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Thanks for summing it up so succinctly. As an aging dev, I've seen quite a lot of tech come and go. I wish more people interested in technology would spend more time learning the basics and the history of things.
it's funny, but also holy moly do I not trust a "sign in with github" button
load more comments
(2 replies)
Good thing I hate web development
10/10. No notes.
It pains me so much when I see my colleagues pay OpenAI to do programming assignments.. they see it is faster to ask gpt, than learn it properly. Sadly, I can say nothing to them, or I would risk worsening relations with them.
I'm glad they do. This is going to generate so much work opportunities to undo their messes.
Except that they are research students in PhD course, it would exacerbate code messiness in research paper codebases.
Or open source projects..
You should probably click the link
I don't remember progressive web apps having anywhere near the level of fanfare as the other things on this list, and as someone that has built several pwas I feel their usefulness is undervalued.
More apps in the app store should be pwas instead.
Otherwise this list is great and I love it.
I will use AI to prompt AI to code for me, free money 🤑