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We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

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Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#21

Post by faeriechangling »

My impression is that AI has done more for the accessibility of coding than the efficiency of coding.

Sure, it's much more possible for bob from accounting to throw together some trivial python script than it was a few years ago, but it seems the main benefit more skilled programmers get from it seems to be helping with syntax and pumping out boilerplate. Which is quite a bit of programming work but well less than 70% of it.

When a problem is tricky, it seems people turn off the autopilot.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#22

Post by wakawaka28 »

kadoban wrote: post #9
dyauspitr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most big corps just need a lot of decent coders to pump out a lot of business logic and UI. AI is definitely going to be able to do that with some basic human validation along the way.

At a big corp: 90% of my job is talking to various people to figure out what we want to code, who has to approve it, who I have to coordinate changes with, etc. AI can currently _maybe_ do half of the 10% that's left, with good amounts of supervision.

The supervision is also difficult to do unless people get enough experience actually doing the job, so expect it to take even longer to get people to verify the code once it's written by AI. This is the same concern people have about autonomous driving. If you let the machine take over, then you'll be out of touch when you're called on to do the real tricky bits of work.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#23

Post by faeriechangling »

danpalmer wrote: post #19

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of wo…

I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do.

The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% more efficient is simply wrong.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#24

Post by lionkor »

elric wrote: post #18

If this number is anywhere near accurate across companies, this might end up having far ranging consequences that we're not ready for. Aside from the obvious unemployment of those replaced by AI, why would anyond still want become CS/IT graduate? Might as well close down 70% of CS/IT departments.

I believe only people with a serious lack of skill and lack of drive to change that are in danger here.

When AI starts to produce compilable non-trivial code, I'll consider changing my mind, but that has yet to happen.

Visual Studio can auto suggest me stuff while I'm refactoring, that easily saves me an hour a week of work during a busy week. The rest of my work can't be automated by any current AI, because most of my work is thinking, debugging and testing.

LLMs can only go "Oh, i'm so sorry, let me just try brute forcing the problem! Heres another variation of the solution, please spend 5-15 minutes testing it to exhaustion!" - "Ah, my bad, heres another fix that doesnt work: ..."... etc.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#25

Post by strken »

martindbp wrote: post #17
yahoobing wrote: post #2

If 7 out of 10 coders are made redundant because of AI right now in May 2024 then you had very bad coders to begin with. If you do the same with translators now in May 2024 you will provide a horrible service. June may be a different kettle of fish!

Most coding is not rocket science, just drudgery. Still, 7/10 implies some very junior level tasks.

The thing about outsourcing is that you need to break tasks into tiny well-specified units for your contractors to do, not because they're idiots but because they have little context on anything and often need to be able to work from a different time zone without much back-and-forth. Tiny well-specified units are exactly what copilot speeds up, but they come at the price of increased costs elsewhere: more PMs/business analysts, more managers, onshore engineers whose job is solely to support offshore staff, etc.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#26

Post by gexla »

This isn't telling me much. They are less reliant on contractors. I'm guessing these contractors have far greater overhead and handle things which require the least knowledge of the systems they are working on. This could create more full time jobs for BP, by freeing up funds to put more internal people behind AI assisted dev.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#27

Post by akmarinov »

Seriously guys, what am I missing that they can do that?

I’ve tried doing just basic json printing apps and the AIs (GPT-4o, Claude Opus, Gemini) often fail me after digging into what needs to be done.

They do great at scaffolding things and getting you maybe 40-50% there, then they hit a brick wall of awful code and not doing what I want.

How can you replace devs for even these simplest cases? It just doesn’t work at the end.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#29

Post by wakawaka28 »

danpalmer wrote: post #19

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of wo…

>On the other hand, if you're a highly paid software engineer, it's likely you're already working with highly automated and abstracted systems, so there's much less opportunity for LLMs.

I think you're wrong about this. There are people today getting paid lots of money for basic jobs, and people with real difficult jobs that don't get paid much. Pay rate is as much a function of location and your particular company or industry as it is the actual nature of what you are doing.

>Yes there's Copilot/etc which will reduce boilerplate, but the only way a company achieves "70% less coders" is by wholesale automation of large parts of their process that must be horribly basic already.

The basics often only seem basic because we've done them a great deal. When the machines are charged with doing a lot of stuff, will the basics still appear basic? Will you be able to spot the critical yet tricky errors buried inside reams of code for a process that you never have to develop yourself? Furthermore, will you be able to skip all the basics in your career development and work on advanced things? I have my doubts. A lot of "horribly basic" "drudgery" will have to be done manually, because it is too important to leave to the whims of a LLM and people have no other way to develop the necessary skills to sustain the industry.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#30

Post by gexla »

faeriechangling wrote: post #23
danpalmer wrote: post #19

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of wo…

I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do. The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% mor…

Maybe you need to be more specific about which workers you're talking about.

Given a full time worker vs a contractor, I'm guessing the contractor has far less knowledge of the system as a whole, and ripe for being replaced. Then with freed up funds, maybe they hire more internal developers. It could be more of a reshuffling than anything else.

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