Meanwhile in India... https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establi...
We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
51–60 of 87 posts
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#52What 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.
LLMs are fairly good at understanding how a bunch of naming in slightly different forms maps around a system. This is basically the one trick that transformers/attention does! I think a smart copy/paster is what LLMs will be good at.
What they won't be good at is when there are deeper semantics, when there are performance requirements, when there's a complex data model, or when you need to come up with the data model and consider how that will work over time.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#53Honestly I believe that should wholesale replacement of people come about, programmers will be one of the last ones to be replaced, with the first ones being probably translators, then customer service, help desk clerks etc.
Basically almost all intellectually challenging problems have a major component of programming, to the point that most engineering professions are thought of a special case of 'programmer'. Data Scientists', ML engineers', Electrical engineers' valuable outputs are usually some kind of computer code.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
70% fewer?
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#55as a backend dev what do
i do to stay safe from this?
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…
I mean, it sounds a lot like a standard management failure mode, which must be about half a century old at this stage: pretend you can get by on X% of staff due to [faddish pretext], then a year later when the cracks start showing quietly hire more people again. The nature of the fad changes, but the basic story is generally about the same.
Actually, I’m not sure it’s even that; at this point the claim seems to be that they _can_ get by on 30% of the staff, not that they _are doing so_. There’s a decent chance this is just a case of “oh, shit, earnings call coming up, we have to mention AI because the markets like that”, tbh.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#57"Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now. They can operate in multiple languages, 14, 15 languages easily. In the past, that hasn't been something we can do. So we can redeploy people off that given that the AI can do it."
For the customers this is going to be a horrible experience and frustration of going in a loop with an AI model. Anyone facing a problem not listed in the 10-15 predefined problems and resolutions is going to have an excruciating time trying to get any meaningful resolution.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#58What 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…
So true. What it did come for was my part time job of taking a png in a folder, create 5 sizes with the size appended to the file names, put these in a subfolder, convert all sizes to avif and webp and generate the picture html block for the image (avif with fallback webp. png sizes are deleted, original png archived). It took one prompt to get that script and I only changed the name of it to dothis.sh it works with one or 258 .png files in the folder.
I fired the me responsible last week.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#59Earlier 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.
People take like 2% of the time to review and approve a PR compared to the person writing it.
Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding
#60Someone is definitely lieing to someone else here.