Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#421

Post by immibis » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #367

lrem wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really about the numbers. My pile of money at retirement would definitely be larger if I moved across the pond. But here my children walk themselves to school from the age of six. I don’t worry about them getting killed by a madman. And even the homeless get healthcare, including functional mental health support. Things no employer can offer in the US.

This a very reasonable viewpoint. As a different personal opinion, I am glad that I live on my side of the pond. I am in my early 50s, and having worked in tech for the last 24 (with sane hours and never at the FAANG salaries) I own my condo in a nice town, my kids college is paid for and my personal accounts are well into 7-digits. This is not all roses: schools in the US stink (I have grown up on the other side of…

Don't forget that your stock market retirement account is also a government welfare program.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#422

Post by mistrial9 » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

williamcotton wrote: post #135

mistrial9 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but you are not the sort that most of these comments are talking about.. Wasn't your demo at PyCon making jaws drop among hard core techies ?

Generalizing the talent and enthusiasm of your peers based on the tools they enjoy to use is going to cause friction.

this is fun but also sort of startling to see https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/writing-web-applicati...

.. the exact same content for a screensaver with Todd Rundgren in 1987 on the then-new color Apple Macintosh II in Sausalito, California. A different screensaver called "Flow Fazer" was more popular and sold many copies. The rival at the time was "After Dark" .. whose founder had a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley but also turned out to be independently wealthy, and then one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area after the dot-com boom.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#423

Post by immibis » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #275

ipaddr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers of the past worked towards the title of webmaster. A webmaster can manage a server, write the code and also be a graphic artist. Developers want to do it all. What has changed is micromanaging of daily standup which reshapes work into neat packages for conversation but kills a non linear flow and limits exploration making things exactly as requested instead of what could be better.

What has also changed in my opinion is the vast landscape of tooling and frameworks at every level of the stack. We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there. I'm afraid…

> a lambda

A CGI script, even, which Lambda is the cloudified version of.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#424

Post by anthomtb » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #204

It lets people make more PRs. Woohoo. Who cares? Does it increase the number of things that pass QA? Do the things done with AI assistance have fewer bugs caught after QA? Are they easier to extend or modify later? Or do they have rigid and inflexible designs? A tool that can help turn developers into unknown quality code monkeys is not something I’m looking for. I’m looking for a tool that helps developers find bugs…

Dev - “Hey copilot, please split this commit into 5 separate commits”

Copilot - “okay I can do that for you! Here are your new commits!”

Senior Dev - “why? Your change is atomic. I’ll tell management to f-off, in a kind way, if they bring up those silly change-per-month metrics again”

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#425

Post by elric » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

alternatex wrote: post #5

I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…

I don't remember who said it, but "AI generated code turns every developer into a legacy code maintainer". It's pithy and a bit of an exaggeration, but there's a grain of truth in there that resonates with me.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#426

Post by MrDarcy » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

bluepizza wrote: post #339

crystal_revenge wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether the decline in IT worker quality I think it entirely has to do with a generation of software people getting into the field (understandably) because it makes them a lot of money, rather than because they're passionate about software. These, by-and-large, are mediocre technical people and they tend to hire other mediocre technical people. When I look around at many of the newer startups that are popping up th…

While you have a good point, I think the experts also branched off with some unreasonable requirements. I remember reading Yegge's blog post, years ago, saying that an engineer needed to know bitwise operators, otherwise they were not good enough. I don't know. Curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving seem to me much more important criteria for an engineer to have, rather than bitwise operations. An engine…

> I remember reading Yegge's blog post, years ago, saying that an engineer needed to know bitwise operators, otherwise they were not good enough.

I think he's right, nearly every engineer needs a basic understanding IP routing more today than in the 2000's with how connected the cloud is. Few engineers do, however.

Every time you need to ask yourself, "Where is this packet going?" you're using bitwise operators.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#427

Post by foobarian » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

maxrecursion wrote: post #412

dimal wrote: post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

For me, AI is like a documentation/Googlefu accelerant. There are so many little things that I know exactly what I want to do, but can't remember the syntax or usage. For example, writing IaC especially for AWS, I have to look up tons of stuff. Asking AI gets me answers and examples extremely fast. If I'm learning the IaC for a new service I'll look over the AWS docs, but if I just need a quick answer/refresher, AI i…

I find that for AWS IaC specifically with a high pace of releases and a ton of versions dating back more than a decade the AI answers are a great spring board but require a bit of care to avoid mixing APIs.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#428

Post by jiiam » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

maxrecursion wrote: post #412

dimal wrote: post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

For me, AI is like a documentation/Googlefu accelerant. There are so many little things that I know exactly what I want to do, but can't remember the syntax or usage. For example, writing IaC especially for AWS, I have to look up tons of stuff. Asking AI gets me answers and examples extremely fast. If I'm learning the IaC for a new service I'll look over the AWS docs, but if I just need a quick answer/refresher, AI i…

My experience with IaC output is that it's so broken to not only be unhelpful but actively harmful.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#429

Post by bluepizza » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

tel wrote: post #401

bluepizza wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a switch up. The author said that an engineer would find these during their journey, and I am asking when. I don't have a strongly held opinion here, I literally want to know when. I am curious about it.

Personally, I think it’s possible to not encounter them. I surely avoided them for a while in my own career, finding them to be the tricks of a low-level optimization expert of which I felt little draw. But then I started investigating type systems and proof languages and discovered them through Boolean algebras. I didn’t work in that space, it was just interesting. I later learned more practically about bits through…

I've mostly done corporate Java stuff, so a lot of it didn't come up, as Spring was already doing it for me.

I've first got to enjoy low level programming when reading Fabien Sanglard breaking down Carmack's code. Will look into WASM, sounds like it could be a fun read too.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#430

Post by EvkoGS » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 4:05 PM UTC

alternatex wrote: post #5

I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…

>Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them though.

You are not a fucking priest in the temple of engineering, go to fucking CS dep at the local uni and be the one and preach it there. You are worker of the company with customers, which pays you a salary from customers money.