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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

#61

Post by ffsm8 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50
gofreddygo wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

You're unironically believing an MBA who's bonus likely depends on optimizing processes (which is a fancy way of saying "firing whoever they can get away with") over people on this forum, half of which likely code themselves?

AI has made big splashes and some industries are in the process of getting annihilated (ie. Designers working for marketing agencies and similar roles). I'd expect things to get more spicy over the coming decade for programming, too... But right now, at this very moment: LLMs can't code good enough to save time unless the programmer is a total novice.

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

#62

Post by binkethy »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50
gofreddygo wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

"People in the trenches" That is rich. People on HN are often working software devs of some kind, but what do i know.

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

#63

Post by pllbnk »

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.

The difference between cheap outsourcing by humans and LLMs is that in the former case this 50% of working code remains more or less constant, while with LLMs, I would assume, it gets exponentially lower with every iteration. I use LLMs for my daily work and personal matters a lot and I certainly admire the value they bring but the shortcomings cannot be unseen.

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

#64

Post by netsharc »

yashg wrote: post #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…

Some company's call centers are designed to fuck around and frustrate you until you give up trying to get what you want (e.g. compensation). Here's looking at you AirBnB. Hah, imagine making something that evil with AI, you don't even need to destroy your outsourced call-center workers' souls...

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

#65

Post by yahoobing »

dyauspitr wrote: post #59
kaptainscarlet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2% time is superficial review.

For a 40h all week job that is less than 1h

Not enough time to even understand the requirements of a 40h job.

10h would be minimum.

Unless you are just checking that the style guide is correct and obvious missed null checks.

For this reason I feel code reviews are a bit silly and pair programming is way better (pairing with a mix of sync and async work) but that is an aside.

In addition a code review being short is usually because the coder and reviewer are both very competent. Once AI enters the chat the reviewer needs to look very closely at every line.

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

#66

Post by koonsolo »

AI is StackOverflow on steroids. That's how I see it from a programmer's perspective.

It's excellent at getting code snippets, suggesting possible ways on how to handle something, etc. I recently had to help out my son with Arduino programming, which I'm totally new at, and thanks to ChatGPT this was super fast and easy.

But to handle an actual codebase, even a single developer codebase, it just doesn't have enough context for that.

I'm sure some day computers will be smarter than us, but some people are still seriously overestimating this.

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

#67

Post by dyauspitr »

yahoobing wrote: post #65
dyauspitr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People take like 2% of the time to review and approve a PR compared to the person writing it.

2% time is superficial review. For a 40h all week job that is less than 1h Not enough time to even understand the requirements of a 40h job. 10h would be minimum. Unless you are just checking that the style guide is correct and obvious missed null checks. For this reason I feel code reviews are a bit silly and pair programming is way better (pairing with a mix of sync and async work) but that is an aside. In addition…

Sure but a “superficial” review is what most corps currently run on. Certain crucial code gets looked at more throughly. If there are any bugs QA catches it.

It’s going to be the same with AI. It pumps out a lot of code. Human does spot checks and probably uses other AI to help with the code review. A real human does the really hard, critical code directly. A more robust QA team makes sure it all works.

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

#68

Post by soco »

chipdart wrote: post #33
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 toda…

My usual dialogues with ChatGPT now 4o: I need a SQL to do 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. GPT: sure thing. Me: umm you forgot 4. GPT: oops sorry, here. Me: now you forgot 3. GPT oops sorry, here. Me: you forgot 4 again. Make sure you do both 3 and 4. GPT: oops sorry, here. Me: you forgot 4 again the fuck I'll do it.

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

#69

Post by anonzzzies »

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 seems that the current AI is rather good at stomping together projects made of react saas starters with nano/microservices (workers etc) where everything is one shot and complete replace and some api routes. People who cannot code at all without AI are now making products that work and sell.

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

#70

Post by thefz »

anonzzzies wrote: post #69
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 seems that the current AI is rather good at stomping together projects made of react saas starters with nano/microservices (workers etc) where everything is one shot and complete replace and some api routes. People who cannot code at all without AI are now making products that work and sell.

Good luck when you have to hunt a bug, though.
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