Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ergonaught » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

Putting aside AGI types of actual "intelligence", this is evolution at work, more or less. As soon as someone finds a useful means of automating the "fitness function" testing that the output has desirable qualities (correctness or entertainment or whatever), everything outside the extremes will rapidly leave human hands. The extremes fall soon thereafter.

The problems are mostly sociocultural, and I am reminded of "Agent Smith" commenting on humans rejecting a Matrix simulation that didn't suck for them.

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

#92

Post by MrDresden » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

These tools are incredibly impressive, and they will probably only get better as time goes on.

However, most software being developed and maintained out there is not part of greenfield projects. It is new pieces being built upon the pieces that came before it. Years and decades of different styles, formats and convention.

Sure, in a few years these tools will speed up how quickly some parts of the UI or some internal logic will be created.

But I am not seeing these tools take over the biggest part of my job: connecting vastly different systems together.

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

#93

Post by gchokov » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:37 PM UTC

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #18

gchokov wrote: post #13

My take is that it will decrease the "value" of developers by reducing the demand for them. If a company can be 10x more productive it will probably need less developers. if you can do your job 10x faster it will mean your team would less team members. There's no shortage that is not followed by a glut..

You’re not adressing how a comany would be 10x productive. You are just making things up.

I said, “If”. Please read carefully and don’t make things up. I am already writing code faster. And I am a business owner as well (90 people), so I know how team dynamics work.

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

#94

Post by gchokov » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #24

gchokov wrote: post #13

My take is that it will decrease the "value" of developers by reducing the demand for them. If a company can be 10x more productive it will probably need less developers. if you can do your job 10x faster it will mean your team would less team members. There's no shortage that is not followed by a glut..

> There's no shortage that is not followed by a glut.. There is a shortage of smart humans and has been for a long time. I've never heard of a glut of smart humans in history.

There’s no shortage of smart humans. Interesting how did you come up with this? Perhaps you are smarter than everyone else around you, and lack finding people on your level?

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

#95

Post by zach_garwood » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

I believe that AI will reduce the amount of code software developers write, but writing code is the least important thing we do. The most important is taking nebulous, sometimes contradictory requirements and restating them in such a way that it can be executed by a machine. In my experience, most people don't have the wherewithal or desire to do this. So, I'm guessing coding might go away soon, but software developers will be around for a long while.

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

#96

Post by kbrackson » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

No..our work might morph into refactoring AI's spaghetti but a lot of a programmers job is comforting the person that hired them (whether in house or contract), knowing they have someone on hand to solve whatever problem may arise. This simply won't be the case with AI.

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

#97

Post by rychco » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #27

My immediate guess is that these kinds of tools will greatly enlarge the productivity gap between junior and senior developers. Senior devs will be able (they already are) to generate code, at first boilerplate and gradually more complex code, and effectively work as planners and passive reviewers, in a similar way to how some companies just hire legions of juniors with some architects/seniors guiding and reviewing t…

I agree with this. These AI tools have caused my (not a junior) productivity to skyrocket as a result of eliminating almost every instance of needing to check documentation/stackoverflow/etc. for easy questions in addition to providing most of my annoying boilerplate code. Since I am my own expert opinion on whether the output is correct/satisfactory, I can quickly breeze through verification of output & make corrections as necessary.

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

#98

Post by pulvinar » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

xaduha wrote: post #68

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 relat…

You really should try it out.

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

#99

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

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 totally believe you that Copilot is useful, my contention is that it is useful in the same sense that stackoverflow is useful.

No developer is competing with stackoverflow. These tools are enabling developers to quickly generate code for certain problems, which works especially well for boilerplate. But this isn't actually the main skill of a programmer, it is just some mechanical neccesity to writing software.

Much of what developers do is modifying existing code, fixing bugs, designing architecture and solving novel problems. If an AI could reliably do any of these tasks jobs would be endangered, but certainly that is not the case yet and AI would have to come quite a far way before that.

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

#100

Post by satisfice » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

I define a programmer as a human who mediates the gateway between the world of people and the world of machines. We are like lawyers hired to talk to genies on behalf of people who have been offered wishes.

AI is a dangerous and deceptive tool that requires wise and subtle nudging to make it work.

Results I have gotten from OpenAI are all terrible, for instance. I have to learn “prompt engineering” now. It just high level programming.