Programmers will be worse than fast food at this point. Good luck future CS grads, you're gonna need it
Devin: AI Software Engineer
121–130 of 604 posts
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#122There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals." Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. I guess this is the future. We've coded ourselves out of a job. People are smiling an…
Something I kind of tell myself is that if AI effectively becomes a drop-in replacement for software engineers (or is at least 95% as good as the median one) it's going to suck because I lost my job and we've killed one of the few good careers that exist out there, but on the other hand, look at the big picture. I'm not even sure the "software" industry will exist.
I mean, think about it. Rationally speaking, if people can hire AI engineers at a fraction of the cost of minimum wage employee, then the price pressure on software will be "significant" to put it mildly. The more complex a piece of software is, the more incentive there is for open-source developers to collaborate and pool their resources to make a cheaper alternative using AI agents. This logic could even extend to the AI agents themselves.
I know my prediction is deeply flawed, but basically, if we create an AI that's a drop-in replacement for (most) software engineers, we're probably going to have a massive deflationary crash not just from the software sector, but in the economy in general considering that many white-collar workers have also probably been automated, with the consequences that follow.
I might lose my job, but I'm going to take so much more down with me. My loss is their catastrophe. Sounds terrifying, maybe terrifying enough for our political representatives to address the elephant in the room, that an AI just took out their tax base, the people who still have a job probably make so little that their tax contributions are cancelled out by government benefits (not just welfare mind you, but the simple fact that they drive on free roads), and taxing corporations won't fix this when corporate revenue is probably going to also decrease.
Otherwise though, we're notoriously bad at predicting the future and estimating the general difficulty of something as ambitious as trying to replace certain careers with AI or robots. Any argument you could make for why software engineers (or white-collar work in general) will be different this time was probably made earlier by someone in reference to something like self-driving cars or physical labor, or possibly in reference to a prior attempt at automating white-collar work using a more primitive form of AI.
Best course of action, individually, is probably to skate to where the puck is heading and make an earnest effort at improving your productivity with software copilots, but otherwise I think the least likely outcome is that automating the software engineering profession is as easy as the e/acc crowd on Twitter would have you believe.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you expect would cause the next winter? Or in other words, what capabilities of AI in this context do you expect will stall next?
Failing to meet investors hype would be the biggest reason in my book. Also it seems like training and running these systems is incredibly costly and the prices AI companies charge for their products are being subsidized by investor money, which won't last forever.
Good point. I've wondered about costs becoming prohibitive. However, I've seen impressive optimization of some models where compute requirements are reduced by orders of magnitude. I'm not sure if these accomplishments will be transferrable to all expensive AI use cases, though.
If we were to pay for the actual costs at this point, I do wonder how many people would consider it worth the expense. But I wonder, how much should ChatGPT cost, for example?
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#124There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals." Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. I guess this is the future. We've coded ourselves out of a job. People are smiling an…
> Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…
> Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#125There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals." Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. I guess this is the future. We've coded ourselves out of a job. People are smiling an…
You are vastly overselling current generation AI here. It can do some things -- GitHub Copilot has been useful for people to reduce the boilerplate generation, for example -- but in terms of actual programming which 98% of the time is maintenance (fixing bugs, debugging, adding tests, refactoring, adding features) it's performing mostly bad. It's only good at generating code and maybe "understanding" some of it. Prove me wrong with links and the AI equivalent of CodePen (something that's a very glaring omission in the area).
Secondly, bosses try to fire the most expensive programmers ever since expensive programmers became a thing. All the outsourcing to wherever the salaries are much smaller is being attempted even as I type this now, by probably no less than 1000 companies, in this very second. Why hasn't the area in general still gotten rid of their expensive programmers?
Easy -- the outsourced "talent" produces crap that then costs more to fix and repair than if you hired proper programmers in the first place. Of course that requires some forward thinking that's not limited only by the short-sighted "we are about to save money muahahaha" mindset and as we know many businessmen are incapable of looking forward -- hence this mistake is being done 24/7.
It's 99% the same with these AI coding bots.
Wishing cost savings into existence so far hasn't worked.
Will some interns and smart people who coast on much-higher-than-local wages because they wrote some Python to import their boss' Excel spreadsheets and automatically generate other stuff, lose their jobs? Yes, that's very likely.
Will the senior programmer be replaced? It's not a zero chance, surely, and we already saw significant layoffs in most big US companies but (1) most of the world didn't over-hire during COVID and (2) it's unclear if senior devs were fired, or actual redundancies, and (3) well, most of the world isn't the USA.
So again, you are vastly overselling the current generation AI.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
>can focus on more interesting problems Kind of like how art was supposed to be what humans would be doing while AI does the jobs we don't want, but looks like that will be the first thing to fall to the machines, while humans fight for carpet installation and plumbing jobs (for a while).
Have you ever seen people dreaming of becoming a soulless cog in the machine creating forgettable 3D assets for mobile video games at a no-name studio once we achieve "full automation"? Me neither. What people dream about is being able to go to a field and paint or sing at their leisure, not engaging in the soul crushing rat race that is artistic entrepreneurship. AI is replacing the jobs that make money but are most…
OK but... How will I get money to live and feed my kids and stuff? Will the rich decide they finally have enough this time? Why would they?
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
>can focus on more interesting problems Kind of like how art was supposed to be what humans would be doing while AI does the jobs we don't want, but looks like that will be the first thing to fall to the machines, while humans fight for carpet installation and plumbing jobs (for a while).
Art as a concept is basically meaningless these days. What is art? Apparently, anything can be art, so what's the difference between art and not_art? From my personal experience, it is used more as a shitty excuse for substandard/lame/overpriced stuff to exist. And to boost it's creator's ego. AI certainly isn't really doing it, just as people aren't. Fuck art.
As you note: “it is used more as a shitty excuse”, this is “art as excuse”.
> Fuck art.
For me, art is both personal expression and interpretation, and yeah, those things can be imbued or ascribed to “anything”.
Even a comment on a web forum.
Your comment is an expression of your personality.
Your comment is your art.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got a good point here. I've wondered about this at times. Like, what if we can't find a way to advance these agents much beyond where Devin is now? What if they can't consume a code base and make meaningfully high quality additions to them reliably, so they're essentially stuck as novice/intermediate developers? This seems nice(ish) for someone like me with a senior title and experience (~15 years), but totall…
While it certainly make you, the individual, less productive because you've been replaced by a machine, it still makes society more productive. If replaced, you essentially were the misallocated capital: capital paying your salary was inefficient compared to that same salary paying a more productive AI. This means you will either have to find a way to become more efficient to compete against AI for developer jobs, or…
This is objectively accurate, and I think you mean to be nothing but. However, the mechanistic focus on efficiency and profit at the direct expense of human quality of life is downright goulish. We need political changes that ensure people who are “outmoded” by this tech can still have good lives.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#129There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals." Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. I guess this is the future. We've coded ourselves out of a job. People are smiling an…
How is this any different than the industrial revolution ushering in a new age, or for that matter any technology that creates huge efficiencies in labor? The truth is that the future is still very uncertain, and while the easiest thing to do is yell "they took er jerbs" from the top of your lungs, maybe think about how to effectively move forward into the future. There is a book called "Who Moved My Cheese?" and I w…
The whole point of AGI is to be able to do everything a human can do, so this argument doesn't apply in the same way it did for mechanical automation.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#130As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me. I keep failing, because of context length, because of shit output from the model, because of lack of any kind of architecture etc etc etc. I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode. Just yesterday I tried to feed it a simple HTML page to extract a selector, I…
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