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Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

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Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#51

Post by p-e-w »

In my experience, non-programmers lack not only the ability to translate concepts to code, but to formulate those concepts in the first place.

Ask someone who isn't a software engineer to guide you in developing a simple program. You do all the actual coding, they just tell you what they want to happen. You will find that most people are unable to describe even high-level actions in the form of a coherent, procedural sequence.

Even the best code-generating AI won't solve this problem, since it cannot generate useful code if the operator cannot articulate what they actually need.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#52

Post by tekknik »

anthropodie wrote: post #17
fxtentacle wrote: post #12

Of course not. For the same reason why companies pay $2000 per day for an experienced consultant when an employee could theoretically build the same stuff at minimum wage. Sometimes, mistakes are expensive. And then you need people who can reason about why they are doing what they are doing. AI can maybe churn out CRUD better than other generators, but when you have any significant amount of money depending on the so…

It's excellent for menial programming tasks like fill up database with dummy data or generating boilerplate code.

For now, 2-3 years ago it couldn’t even generate code. 2-3 years from now will be very different.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#53

Post by muglug »

In a 5-10 years, generally-available tools resembling ChatGPT will be able to do about 90% of what a programmer does, but the remaining 10% will remain AI-complete.

The AI-complete bit is stuff like reading a set of instructions and realising that one of the instructions doesn't make sense given the other ones, and pushing back. It's looking through an UPDGRADING.md file to see how an API changed, realising that the thing you want isn't there, then looking at the actual source-code of a library to understand an undocumented breaking change. It's understanding how to write a program such that it's easy to parallelise in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#54

Post by hsn915 »

tsingy wrote: post #48
hsn915 wrote: post #26

I don't know how the latest stuff from OpenAI will impract the career of average programmers. But regarding your last question: > how would you try to AI-proof your career? Learn to program from first principles.

How do you learn to program form first principles?

In my humble opinion, Mike Acton's talks are the best introduction, although he doesn't use the term "first principles", and they seem - at the surface - to be about game engines, but they are generalizable to everything.

Data Oriented Design (2014):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Solving the Right Problems (2017):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B00hV3wmMY

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#55

Post by mark_l_watson »

constantcrying wrote: post #9

>Do you think that some form of AI will be able to do the job of an average programmer any time soon? No. AI is not a greater threat than stack overflow. The skills of a programmer are not generating 20 lines of code to solve a well known problem. And even a 99% AI is next to useless, since finding errors is exceedingly hard.

I respectfully disagree with you, based on my personal use of Copilot. I find that having boilerplate code for making web service calls, database connections, etc. is an overall time saver. A factor of 10X? No. Obviously not a silver bullet, but a real time saver.

For a while I only had Copilot configured for VSCode and PyCharm, but I mostly use Emacs. The day that I took a little time to configure Emacs to use Copilot, it really hit me how useful Copilot - once I always had it available. Also, the ability to tab through multiple code completions lets me choose what I think is a good completion in a few seconds, or hit ESCAPE to discard them. I have been programming since 1964 (my Dad gave me access to a timeshared BASIC when I was a kid) so I can read code very quickly from almost 60 years of work and play.

I also find Copilot works well with my own bottom up, and REPL based development style.

I understand that many developers don’t like Copilot, but, we are all free to choose our own tools.

Anyway, I appreciate your comment even though my experience is different.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#56

Post by tekknik »

p-e-w wrote: post #43
Tenoke wrote: post #32

Programmer would be the last job to go but it's possible that the number of programmer jobs would start decreasing in the mean time.

> Programmer would be the last job to go Nope. Experience has shown that tasks that require peak intellectual abilities in humans are actually very easy for computers to do. Computers were outperforming humans at calculation 80 years ago, and have been crushing grandmasters at chess since the 90s. Meanwhile, controlling a robot to move efficiently, or reliably distinguishing everyday objects like cats and dogs, is st…

I agree with you for the most part, however the fact that humans can determine a cat from a chair by being shown one cat proves that humans receive more data than some AI with sensors.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your statement.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#57

Post by tjpnz »

We created ChatGPT, Copilot et el. But are they able to generate the code for a more capable version of themselves? Until we're at that point I think most jobs are safe, whether we get to that point is in my view still a philosophical question.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#58

Post by tekknik »

furyofantares wrote: post #37

The current crop of generative AI all seems like it could produce useful tools for various practitioners, programmers included, I don't yet see evidence for replacing jobs. But it's hard to extrapolate. That said the best way to anything-proof this career that's so lucrative is to be frugal and set yourself up to retire early.

The current crop of AI didn’t exist 5 years ago. Generative AI art was still a pipe dream. Now it has a command prompt.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#59

Post by tekknik »

Jensson wrote: post #31
hsn915 wrote: post #26

I don't know how the latest stuff from OpenAI will impract the career of average programmers. But regarding your last question: > how would you try to AI-proof your career? Learn to program from first principles.

Yeah, it is likely that AI can learn to glue code from stack overflow pretty soon. Harder programming that requires you to do a bit of thinking seems more future proof, these models aren't good at thinking at all instead they just pattern match and glue in previous solutions.

We’re just the next new model away. AI researches seem apt on burning the world down to see what comes out of it, so this absolutely is the goal.

Re: Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

#60

Post by tekknik »

pacifika wrote: post #20

As I see it, it generates fakes or potentially correct solutions that require review and alteration. So it’s best employed by a professional that can judge the generated result in a wider context. Not too different from interpreting lighthouse scores. It can make anyone with the means to access it a bad coder but the value of a professional has always been in picking the best solution from the possible ones.

> but the value of a professional has always been in picking the best solution from the possible ones.

When you actually decide the best solution you list pros and cons, weigh risk and cost, etc. These are all easily automated through least cost optimization. Not even using AI.

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