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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

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Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#41

Post by throwawaykeno »

Houshalter wrote: post #31
tikhonj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions: • Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale . Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs ou…

Current program synthesis isn't that advanced. At least not compared to state of the art AI. Recently AI has proved it can beat expert humans at all perfect information games. Go has a ridiculously huge search space, but by using neural networks AIs can learn to narrow it down to a manageable size. Program synthesis is just like a perfect information game. You have a search space, a state, a set of goals, etc. You co…

> You could theoretically make it into a board game

But not actually. Program synthesis is hard even if you have perfect formal requirements. In practice, gathering formal requirements is by far the most difficult task. You're probably better off building a system using modern development practices than trying to collect formal requirements Let alone translating those requirements into code, which is easier than coming up with the requirements but still difficult.

> Recently AI has proved...

FYI, it's not as if the program synthesis folks haven't heard of neural nets... you're giving researchers who actually do this stuff all day surprisingly little credit.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#42

Post by byw »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #34
byw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this way, but this assumes there's an upper limit to demand. I think as the capability of tools increase, so will user expectations in capabilities and coverage. Sure, programming will be more about asking the right questions than implementing solutions. We'd think that'll be easy, but most people have no idea what they want in life, and philosophy is still hard.

It sounds like programmers will be a very different kind of person, with very different skill sets in that reality.

The way I see it, "programming" will become an archaic term. It might become a branch of ethics, but for machines rather than people. It'll involve setting intelligent boundaries.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#43

Post by Hydraulix989 »

origami777 wrote: post #40
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #28

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…

I do some coding but not as a full time job. And I have to admit that when I think of AI replacing a coder's job it seems so far off. Maybe it's because I'm in the thick of it and can't see the forest for the trees. When this comes up I often wonder what part is AI going to replace? Will it: 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution? 2) If not that, will…

"WIll it?

1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?"

At all of my software engineering jobs, I only ever performed tasks that accomplished what one would consider a small fraction of one list item here -- "develop."

So to answer your question, mostly no. You're describing something that an entrepreneur does, not a coder.

"2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest?"

Yes, the "develop"-ment (deployment is getting automated already -- Chef, Heroku, etc. -- and operate is also largely automated now thanks to things like cloud computing services).

Case in point: Why did WhatsApp have so few employees for its billion users? Well, automation made launching a web startup (doing (1), as you described) a much leaner proposition.

As you can see, AI is not a necessary condition for automation.

I have no reason to believe these trends will reverse course.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#44

Post by learc83 »

orthoganol wrote: post #22
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

Replaceable or replaceable by AI? Already today standard CRUD web development is largely automateable. I already have my own specialized scripts from years of experience, targeting backend, front end, design components, that generate most of what I want with some basic inputs. I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. This kind of approach already does replace programmers, an…

>I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too.

I don't think that's true at all unless you're talking about 3rd party tools like rails scaffolding. What languages / frameworks are you using by the way?

The boilerplate stuff that can be replaced by scripts is maybe 10-15% of my time anyway. The rest of my time is spent at a much higher level either trying to interpret client requests, trying to help the client decide what they want, making high level design decisions, or adding features that require way to much customization to use automated code generators.

This is much different if we're talking about a language like C where a much higher percentage of my time is spent on boilerplate code. However with newer languages and frameworks I think we're reaching diminishing returns for what can be automated by either the language itself or generator scripts/frameworks.

There is a huge productivity difference between using C and raw PHP when writing a CRUD app. There's less of a productivity boost (still huge though) when moving from raw PHP to something like Rails. And there's even less of a jump between Rails and something newer like Phoenix. I expect that the next 10 years will give us even smaller incremental improvements.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#45

Post by eellpp »

tryitnow wrote: post #20
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

As someone else already pointed out we actually do have robots doing surgery. AIs are not dogs - that's a bad analogy. Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. A lot of businesses don't care so much about quality and craftsmanship - as long as their customers are stuck with them they're perfectly willing to ship the mos…

> Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it.

There is already a big trend of automation albeit on the IT side and not on development. Where it used to take a separate IT team and developers and DB admins etc there is growing field of devOps with automation. Companies, especially startups are biting into this trend and vendors, especially Cloud vendors are spearheading this movement.

If there is glare of possibility of automating the development, these vendors and companies would have been all over it. This behaviour is not seen, means that this a possibility that exists in distant future.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#46

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #28

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…

Sigh. Apologists? Really?

Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work.

Good grief, dude.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#47

Post by Hydraulix989 »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #46
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #28

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…

Sigh. Apologists? Really? Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work. Good grief, dude.

There's actually a great underlying point here, to make up for this comment's lackluster delivery thereof.

If anything, Visual Basic is a great example of something that ended (a significant part of) programming.

I don't know too many people these days writing WIN32 C GUIs any more, thanks to my above-described forces of abstraction.

Sure, VB wasn't the best abstraction for graphical user interfaces -- it looks like web was the real winner here, but GUI programming has been "abstracted out" or automated, if you will.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#48

Post by eellpp »

coldcode wrote: post #35

There will be a day when the last programmer writes the last program. Long after we are all dead. While some types of jobs may be automatable, most of what I have to do makes little sense to smart people much less a rigid AI. What AI can take almost random requirements, strange UI designs and animations and clueless VP driven features and turn it into something people want to use. I think the VP's are more likely to…

VP may be replaced by a VP role that requires him to convert the random requirements to specifics or guide the AI on UI design etc. Instead of a VP and team of developers there would be devVp would could bridge this gap. And then in still further future, this friction could even be removed ...

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#49

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Apologists? Really? Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work. Good grief, dude.

There's actually a great underlying point here, to make up for this comment's lackluster delivery thereof. If anything, Visual Basic is a great example of something that ended (a significant part of) programming. I don't know too many people these days writing WIN32 C GUIs any more, thanks to my above-described forces of abstraction. Sure, VB wasn't the best abstraction for graphical user interfaces -- it looks like…

That didn't end because of VB. The web has taken over desktop GUI programs because of how lucrative your personal information has become.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#50

Post by internaut »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

Consider that you may be underestimating the tacit knowledge that a HNer typically has.

The majority of large SV corporations beyond Google/Facebook do not make much sense to me.

Dropbox? Why not operate your own server?

Apple iphone? There existed separated out telephone/camera/other technology with superior characteristics for less money.

Many many jobs and companies exist because the barrier to entry is too high for most people, even though to insiders their tasks seem ludicrously straight forward. Dropbox and Apple are just an abstraction layer.

Or to put it the way I heard it on Reddit:

"I went to fix some tech issue with the office computers. They're all 50-something boomer gen types who treat being outside of their comfort zone on their laptops as if they were retreating into a radioactive wilderness. I rebooted all the machines. They worked. They looked at me as if I were a wizard."

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