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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#11

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

There is a lot of doom and gloom about programming and AI.

However, let me talk about something to be excited for.

I am really excited about LLMs taking the drudgery out of programming. There are many times what I have a project in mind that I want to do, but there is a lot of boilerplate (writing configurations, or writing tests, etc) that I have to do and slows me down or for personal projects even keeps me from doing them. However, if I have an AI assistant that I can assign all the drudgery to, and I can focus on the interesting work, I feel that my creativity can really be unleashed.

I am most excited to see the results of this in games. Right now, to produce a AAA game is a lot of work and requires massive teams (if only for the art assets). However, I can see a future where once again a single programmer can write very compelling games (and even have the AI generate the art assets for the game based on the programmer's vision).

I personally am looking forward to the future.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#14

Post by sesuximo »

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…

Maybe of interest https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/single-pilot-planes/index...

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#15

Post by rosywoozlechan »

I'm going to be the optimist here and instead of AI killing engineering jobs it's going to turn most engineers into much better engineers and what tech company doesn't want a whole bunch of better engineers? Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively. Maybe it's all just upside.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#18

Post by scj »

What I want is an AI that can do static analysis of code and report defects that traditional static analysis couldn't hope to detect.

I suspect that detecting errors that way will be a part of training non-terrible code generators. But with the added benefit of being useful to human programmers as well.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#19

Post by adolph »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #15

I'm going to be the optimist here and instead of AI killing engineering jobs it's going to turn most engineers into much better engineers and what tech company doesn't want a whole bunch of better engineers? Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively. Maybe it's all just upside.

Speed of feature is less compelling than quality. There is a saying about EHRs, that they propagate error at the speed of light. Likewise speeding up feature accrual seems as if all the worst ideas will be implemented first as the best ones need time to think through and acculturate.

On the other hand, if the models can be Atkinson-like and produce -2000 lines of code [0], that is a day to which I would look forward.

0. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#20

Post by reducesuffering »

raincom wrote: post #16
angarg12 wrote: post #4

But programmer salaries already are bimodal, or even trimodal [1]. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Indeed, programmer salaries even in the Bay Area are bimodal.

Bay Area, no: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
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