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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

#71

Post by kaptainscarlet »

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…

Code reviews are more of a formality, a pointless one. There's little to no value in one code reviewing a piece of code without the background business problem being solved by it.

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

#72

Post by Braini »

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.

Yeah thats because then they don‘t really look at it and certainly don‘t really understand it.

In some way reviewing code is more complicated and hard than actually writing it.

I really like the „reverse centaur“ metaphor by Doctorow regarding the automation AI will bring us - humans having to double check the stuff AI wrote for correctness in AI pace.

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

#73

Post by soco »

thefz wrote: post #70
anonzzzies wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about you just tell AI to build you a new site? Presumably your prompt will be better now, and AI will be a newer one, so chances are you'll get a site without that particular bug. This approach to debugging would be quite a new paradigm, and even a bit more adapted to consumer society for better or for worse.

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

#74

Post by soco »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #29
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 o…

Here is a question worth answering yet often overlooked: if AI helps the newbs generate useful stuff but which they don't properly understand, and also helps experienced find the issues on AI generated stuff based on their experience, WHERE is the middle ground where newbs can gain the experience to bring them to that senior level? I see no path going from there to there, unless the juniors start doing things by hand again, for which nobody will want to pay them (hey why don't you use AI instead). And seniors don't live forever...

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

#75

Post by yahoobing »

dyauspitr wrote: post #67
yahoobing wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you are right in the near future but not today. I don’t think we are quite there yet with AI but the pace of improvement is breathtaking and producing code (and more generally “logic” which could be code but also machine code, system design, LLM prompts and so on) is such a pot of gold the AI companies will go for it.

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

#76

Post by dns_snek »

soco wrote: post #73
thefz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about you just tell AI to build you a new site? Presumably your prompt will be better now, and AI will be a newer one, so chances are you'll get a site without that particular bug. This approach to debugging would be quite a new paradigm, and even a bit more adapted to consumer society for better or for worse.

Maybe you'll get a site without that particular bug, but you're almost guaranteed to get a site where the unspecified semantics are slightly different compared to the previous version, along with new exciting bugs, and at some point you're likely going to get to data corruption issues because some invariant of the system won't be preserved properly. You'll run into memory leaks and race conditions that you won't be able to resolve. At some point your AI will likely generate new exciting vulnerabilities, leak all customer data and get you buried in lawsuits too.

All of these issues are nearly impossible to spot and correct unless you're an expert yourself, but then you wouldn't need AI in the first place.

That said, I fully expect such an industry to take off and we'll all be worse off for it. Lowering the barrier to entry is empowering for those who couldn't develop software before, which is good, but if it enters mainstream usage then we're all going to suffer even worse products and services.

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

#77

Post by soco »

dns_snek wrote: post #76
soco wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you just tell AI to build you a new site? Presumably your prompt will be better now, and AI will be a newer one, so chances are you'll get a site without that particular bug. This approach to debugging would be quite a new paradigm, and even a bit more adapted to consumer society for better or for worse.

Maybe you'll get a site without that particular bug, but you're almost guaranteed to get a site where the unspecified semantics are slightly different compared to the previous version, along with new exciting bugs, and at some point you're likely going to get to data corruption issues because some invariant of the system won't be preserved properly. You'll run into memory leaks and race conditions that you won't be a…

I won't disagree with you so just let me add that also today we get buggy software and enshittification all over the place. All what AI has to do is deliver those cheaper.

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

#79

Post by kcplate »

ffsm8 wrote: post #61
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> unless the programmer is a total novice

Might be different in SV or at a FAANG, but speaking from my nearly 4 decades of experience in tech, many to most programmers that have come up in the last 20 years are either lifetime novices, or at least just barely capable of productivity. I see 80% of the work being done by the top 20%. I think AI is definitely going to devastate the vocation because it’s going to replace that 80% barely productive group. I can see a future where most of the code is written to a 90% completion level by AI, then finished by the best of the best of us ugly bags of mostly water.

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