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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?

#61

Post by tekknik »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #55
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 Copil…

> I find that having boilerplate code for making web service calls, database connections, etc. is an overall time saver.

Why? If you setting up service calls correctly you have a client you instantiate and call some method on. Your service calling should be one line plus error handling (1-3 more lines). Databases are initialized once, again 2-3 lines of code.

If you think any of this is a time saver, or is difficult, your job is at risk from copilot. You are training your successor.

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

#62

Post by nomilk »

Some hunches:

- AI will hypercharge us, but we'll still need to know what we're doing.

- Polyglots will be more common (since nailing syntax won't take nearly as long)

- Increased importance of understanding framework conventions, architecture and 'the system'

- More time debugging crappy AI-written code!

- Demand for software development will increase (not decrease) since time to market and cost will go down, making many more projects viable.

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

#63

Post by p-e-w »

tekknik wrote: post #56
p-e-w wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe the fact that humans can distinguish a cat from a chair after being shown just a single cat actually demonstrates that humans have much deeper insight into what a "concept" is than current AIs do.

If sensor data were the problem, computers could easily outperform humans since we have sensors that generate much more detailed data than the human senses: High-resolution cameras, multi-spectral and thermal imaging, x-rays, radar, etc.

The actual difference is that when shown a picture and told "this is a cat", humans already know what to look for. Even if a human has never seen a cat before, they will not, for example, examine the background of the photo, or the floor the cat is lying on. They will also instinctively derive analogies from similar animals they already know, and deduce lots of correct information about that "cat" without needing to be told explicitly.

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

#65

Post by fxtentacle »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #42
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…

The question wasn't just about ChatGPT though. If the SOTA improves as much in the next decade as it has in the last decade (for from a guarantee of course), it will be hard for any tech company to justify having thousands of developers.

Yes.

But in my experience, a small and highly skilled team already outcompetes these armies right now.

Working as an "IT consultant" after a 2 week bootstrap course has always been unsustainable. We will likely get rid of 90% of the current "software engineers" without any meaningful reduction in productivity.

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

#66

Post by popotamonga »

No way. Just look at problems like translation. Its a nice tool but you cant rely on it to do a propper translation, it's actually very bad. How long have they been working on the translation problem?

Same with self driving. We get some nice tools to assist drivers but replacement won't come in my lifetime.

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

#68

Post by xaduha »

I used to reply with a joke answer to questions like these along the lines of

> wake me up when it starts to delete bad code instead of writing more of it

I too don't follow AI space closely, but I have hard time imagining it doing anything of the sort. It probably can't even remove a bug in a trivial program.

Correct me if I'm wrong of course, if there's a video that demonstrates something important/impressive related to this then I would certainly watch it.

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

#70

Post by ryzvonusef »

I submitted an example[1] of a programmer trying to use ChatGPT to generate code for two different tasks: download and extract text from a PDF file; and then parse the PDF using regex etc.

It doesn't always work, and the reasons are interesting.

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33940515

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