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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

#31

Post by Roark66 »

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…

70%... By lines written? Or by time taken? There is a huge difference. Sometimes you spend days trawling old code, even older dependencies to discover adding a line may fix your problem. In the meantime you may've read hundreds of pages of docs, seen dozens of diagrams. Hunted people that moved between departments and "worked on this before" etc. Then after you fix it yours in charge of organising testing and deployment to cert/prod including representing the change in risk assessment meetings. Good luck using AI to replace this work.

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

#33

Post by chipdart »

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…

> 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%).

What I find odd is that AI tools are used to create new code but the bulk of the work is in rewriting and changing existing software,and fixing issues by touching single lines of code spread throughout the project.

Perhaps AI tools will improve, but today you need an awful lot of prompting to get a single decent usable starting point. In some applications you end up spending far more time prompting the AI tool than what you would end up doing by simply writing the thing.

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

#34

Post by fxtentacle »

akmarinov wrote: post #27

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 a…

I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.

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

#35

Post by yellow_lead »

> We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that's a big savings for the company moving forward.

Reading code is sometimes much harder than writing it yourself. If you still have to validate the code, I don't understand how it's a net gain.

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

#36

Post by colechristensen »

lol, on an earnings call. Someone is lying and being lied to.

Unless they were paying a whole bunch of programmers to do not much useful at all or just incredibly simple repetitive things, this is obviously not true to anyone who has tried to use LLMs to solve problems.

I’m guessing some mid management sold the idea of firing 2/3 of the development staff and somebody is declaring victory a bit early.

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

#37

Post by imtringued »

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.

AST input is a tiny fraction of computer science.

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

#38

Post by danpalmer »

Roark66 wrote: post #31
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…

70%... By lines written? Or by time taken? There is a huge difference. Sometimes you spend days trawling old code, even older dependencies to discover adding a line may fix your problem. In the meantime you may've read hundreds of pages of docs, seen dozens of diagrams. Hunted people that moved between departments and "worked on this before" etc. Then after you fix it yours in charge of organising testing and deploym…

I'm talking about time spent. I completely agree that all the work you've mentioned is stuff that takes time and that AI won't replace any time soon, but I strongly doubt that it's the bulk of the work.

I'm talking about the programmers that a friend of mine works with who take several quarters to produce a dashboard, or the entry level PHP jobs that make barely above minimum wage and sell custom websites and hosting to real-estate companies in small towns, or the outsourced programmers that other friends interact with, who spent ~10 eng over 2 years building a "PaaS" style system in shell scripts that no one in their company actually uses because surprise surprise no one ever thought to ask whether it was necessary or had the right feature set or even worked (but management paid for it).

These people are spending a significant amount of their time coding, but they're not spending time automating, or improving the process for next time, and so the work they're doing is fairly trivial and is most likely to be impacted by AI.

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

#39

Post by colechristensen »

fxtentacle wrote: post #34
akmarinov wrote: post #27

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 a…

I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.

I’d believe if you did nothing with AI and just fired a big chunk of your bottom tier cheap outsourced programming “talent” your productivity would significantly increase as a result of your actual talent no longer being occupied with managing and reacting to low quality code contribution and contributor hand holding.

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

#40

Post by yahoobing »

kaptainscarlet wrote: post #11
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.

The problem with the validation part is that the human has to go through all the code written by AI. Guess what, understanding someone's code takes almost as much effort as writing the code yourself. Therefore you require just about the same amount of human beings verify AI's code.

Can an AI make a useful PR on a 1million LOC project even.
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