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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#2

Post by Swizec »

> What happened? Well, if you’re an elite lawyer in the modern age, you probably command a large team of lower-tier lawyers, cheap paralegals, and so on, who are very good at using the Internet to look up case law and draft your opinions and so on.

This already happened to programmers. We call these elites some version of tech lead or staff engineer. Maybe even principal, but that feels different still.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#3

Post by sublinear »

Except you can't do a web search on proprietary code within your business, and hosting AI on-premises to model your codebase would likely be a huge waste of money and slower than just telling a real life person what you want.

There has been zero-progress towards AI comprehension, so you can only get out of it what you are already familiar with. The human must always do the mental heavy lifting to tease out a good result, or indeed even know if it's a good result and not just a hallucinated mess.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#6

Post by devmunchies »

I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implemented to be able to train with it.

So in my mind, it will hurt the junior developers doing grunt work more than general devs.

I think no code/low code products are more of a risk to hurting devs than AI.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#7

Post by Nathanba »

devmunchies wrote: post #6

I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers. Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implement…

depending on how advanced this AI will be, it could learn from a few samples and the API docs, possibly itself designed to be optimally consumed by AI. If I knew that AI would consume my custom programming language docs then I would make sure that each API is used once in some kind of sample code so it can give answers to everything. Plus, that's a sensible thing to do anyway.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#8

Post by cldellow »

osigurdson wrote: post #5

What change occurred between 1991 and 2000 to explain the emergence of the bimodal distribution? Presumably lawyers have had paralegals for centuries.

The author of this post claims that the Internet happened, enabling easier, cheaper access to law databases, which increased the value that "top tier" lawyers could extract from their paralegals.

> What happened? Well, if you’re an elite lawyer in the modern age, you probably command a large team of lower-tier lawyers, cheap paralegals, and so on, who are very good at using the Internet to look up case law and draft your opinions and so on. In contrast, if you’re an elite lawyer in the year 1990, it’s much more valuable for you specifically to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the relevant case law, and it’s much harder for you to delegate modular pieces of work off to less competent people.

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