I like how all comments here are "surely it's all just bad coders and not a threat for my big brain" and not like "all our source is being used against us-- today it's juniors, tomorrow it's me".
We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#42Seriously 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…
My experience is that the more experienced you are the less benefit you will see from coding asistants. If you are at the beginning of your career and writing a simple for loop requires serious brain power, an AI coding assistant will seriously speed you up. The same goes for task complexity. Mainstream tasks will work better than specialized ones simply due to the lack of adequate training material.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#43What 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 o…
Fair points, although I think you may be reading my points as more concrete than intended.
When I'm talking about pay I'm thinking location-agnostic, i.e. low to high pay within a comparable region. For every engineer in London earning £100k there's many earning £26k doing more basic work.
And when I say "basic" I don't just mean working with low level systems, I mean working with systems that are un-automated. Working with processes where someone has made the judgement call that it's cheaper to throw large numbers of cheap engineers at the problem rather than fewer highly paid engineers to automate it all away.
That's not to say that highly paid engineers don't need to get into the basics, they definitely do, but that digging into the depths of an automated deployment system is not the same as running repetitive manual tasks.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#44Contract agencies have strong incentives to pad work and payrolls and use process controls to coordinate production. It's perfect for AI disruption because you can test replacements at process boundaries, and there's plenty of excess.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#45What 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…
> boring low paid drudgery
> the sort of work that AI is coming for
AI is hopeless, because of the sheer lack of anything to accurately train itself for this task. It is trying to sell itself to the OEMs and platforms with shiny demos as an even cheaper alternative to the bottom feeding group of outsourced labor.
The joke is going to be real when the $$$ are spent on AI and the outcome is outsourced to the bottom feeding group to maintain.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#46What 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 wonder how much of this can be actually automated by LLMs. Isn't substantial amount of time be just lazily spend tracking down what ever variable name or mapping to right thing?
Just spend time adding very simple script as cronjob by CI/CD... And everything was copy paste. But it still took time to set up and name things. To get the small inconsequential details right.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#47If 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 it's the other way around - most people who have computer science degrees have attended university with a rigorous math, engineering and theoretical computer science curriculum. And despite that, they struggle to use any of it in any meaningful capacity.
Months can go by before I get to solve a good DS & A problem in production. Most of my job consits of fighting with the mundane drudgery of fighting with cloud providers or getting crappy frameworks to do what I want.
I think the value of people who have a deep understanding is about to skyrocket.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#48My 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…
Bob from accounting will not even know how to run a Python script, how to deploy it, install required modules. Programming is in a significant part about knowing how to break a solution to a problem into small, testable, reusable chunks of code and knowing when a one-file script is fine or when a framework (3rd-party or written in house) may be a better solution. Programming is also about knowing the tooling for your language, the operating system, protocols, formats. AI won't help Bob with that.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#49What 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…
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Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#50What 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…
> boring low paid drudgery > the sort of work that AI is coming for This is NOT what AI is coming for. Its too far from even barely capable for that sort of work. BI tools, Wordpress themes, layers and layers of internal tools for custom business processes are all incredibly fragile and intricately balanced. It will have to learn systems where extra empty tags in the xml response get accounts flagged for removal, sys…
They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet.
Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…