编程正从一种创造性的工艺转变为一种令人沮丧的科学。
公平地说，这种情况早在人工智能出现之前就已经开始发生了，当程序员的角色逐渐被商品化为“Python编码员”、“PHP脚本员”、“dotnet开发者”等等。虽然这些确切的词汇并没有出现在职位描述中，但招聘人员和客户开始用这样的方式称呼程序员。
然而，大型语言模型（LLM）将这一趋势推向了更高的层次，今天的编码者开始转变为LLM提示者，这主要是软件生产的方式。尽管如此，他们仍然需要对这些LLM进行细心的监控，在将代码推送到代码库进行持续集成/持续交付（CI/CD）之前，必须彻底审查和测试代码。再过几年，随着更强大的LLM能力的出现，比如“推理”、“上下文确定”、“启发”等等（甚至可能包括“工程”！），这些能力可能会成为gpt-9或当时最热门的LLM版本的一部分。
问题在于，尽管最终结果将是一个非常强大的程序，充满了创造力，但其中并不会有任何人类的创造力。“悲惨科学”这一词最早是由中世纪学者如托马斯·卡莱尔用来指代经济学的。我们只能猜测他们使用这个术语的动机，但或许那个时代的人们认为经济学在某种程度上剥夺了人类社会的生命力，这与许多人今天对人工智能/LLM的看法非常相似。
我理解养家糊口的必要性。为了在这个竞争激烈的IT就业市场中生存，我们必须适应不断变化的趋势和技术，这包括掌握LLM的技能。尽管如此，我仍然对这种新的软件开发方式感到非常沮丧，你不觉得吗？
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To be fair, it had already started happening much before AI came when programmer roles started getting commoditized into "Python coder", "PHP scripter", "dotnet developer", etc. Though these exact phrases weren't used in job descriptions, this is how recruiters and clients started referring programmers as such.<p>But LLMs took it a notch even further, coders have started morphing into LLM prompters today, that is primarily how software is getting produced. They still must baby sit these LLMs presently, reviewing and testing the code thoroughly before pushing it to the repo for CI/CD. A few more years and even that may not be needed as the more enhanced LLM capabilities like "reasoning", "context determination", "illumination", etc. (maybe even "engineering"!) would have become part of gpt-9 or whatever hottest flavor of LLM be at that time.<p>The problem is that even though the end result would be a very robust running program that reeks of creativity, there won't be any human creativity in that. The phrase dismal science was first used in reference to economics by medieval scholars like Thomas Carlyle. We can only guess their motivations for using that term but maybe people of that time thought that economics was somehow taking away the life force from society of humans, much similar to the way many feel about AI/LLM today?<p>Now I understand the need for putting food on the table. To survive this cut throat IT job market, we must adapt to changing trends and technologies and that includes getting skilled with LLM. Nonetheless, I can't help but get a very dismal feeling about this new way of software development, don't you?