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Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#81

Post by janice1999 »

kajumix wrote: post #74
janice1999 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone with "0 coding skill" really compose the prompts in the first place? You need to understand the problem space, the right terminology and visualise a general architecture/structure for the solution. These things might be obvious to you and me but take someone from a different field and it would be the same as handing me the controls to a medical robot and telling me to start pushing buttons.

Do you realize most enterprise coders are writing just simple CRUD applications?

At Meta? I can't say but I doubt it. At the large company I work at - definitely not.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#83

Post by sjtgraham »

myth_drannon wrote: post #77
sjtgraham wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this half-jokingly, but only half: Zuck's on TRT now and thinking much more clearly.

Isn't it the opposite? Testosterone causes high-risk behaviour.

That’s a bad framing. Testosterone makes you less likely to place consensus above all else, which is what you want from a leader. Some will mischaracterise that as risky.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#84

Post by EA-3167 »

bagels wrote: post #46
myth_drannon wrote: post #7

That is the same person who renamed his company to Meta and went all in into the metaverse and how we all be working in the metaverse. The guy got lucky once, that's all, he is not the modern Oracle.

Buying and nurturing Instagram and Whatsapp are two other instances of "getting lucky"

Identifying and buying potential competitors is neither lucky, nor is it visionary, it's just SOP for megacorps with deep pockets and potential competition.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#85

Post by jitl »

seatac76 wrote: post #14

I don’t know how they think that’s going to work. The best AI has been able to do for me is smarter Auto Complete, I doubt it can just fit into larger code bases without the searching a human can do. I know the job market has been rough which has emboldened these CEO’s but we are starting to see hiring pick up again, and not just Staff+, interns, SDE 1 and 2 as well, which bodes well for 2025.

AI can search your code today. In cursor this is called “codebase indexing”. We have some million(s) lines of code, orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook, but definitely larger than the average startup. We search with AI tools, through Q&A, and for AI-driven code mods. Cursor also exposes LSP stuff to their AI system so it can look at that tool.

Sourcegraph Cody is another example of a code AI that can search.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#86

Post by daniel_iversen »

seatac76 wrote: post #14

I don’t know how they think that’s going to work. The best AI has been able to do for me is smarter Auto Complete, I doubt it can just fit into larger code bases without the searching a human can do. I know the job market has been rough which has emboldened these CEO’s but we are starting to see hiring pick up again, and not just Staff+, interns, SDE 1 and 2 as well, which bodes well for 2025.

I think what’ll happen when people say “AI will replace X people” (engineers in this case) it’s not that it’ll for example replace 100% of what 80 people might do (even if they’re kid-level), but rather it’ll make 8 people 10 times more efficient type of thing .. didn’t Tesla’s head of ai or self driving say publicly years ago that co-pilot wrote 80% of his code? It’s not quite apples to apples but you can see how it’s progressing. I know that’s not what Zuck said but I wonder if that might be what he meant?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#87

Post by jakubmazanec »

bsaul wrote: post #38

i'm quite surprised by the level of skepticism in this thread. I've been developping my website + webservice + db only using cursor "composer" mode, not typing a single line of code, and i'm already with something fully functional. I am voluntarely refraining from fixing the bugs myself by digging into the code, just to see how far someone with 0 coding skill can go. And this answer is : as far as a junior / midlevel…

Please, show us the website and the source code - every time I read statement like this, there is no proof.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#88

Post by dinkumthinkum »

resource_waste wrote: post #11

Great, more midlevel engineers for me. I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you must integrate everything. (And if it does the entire job, amazing! Maybe we can spend extra time on a good UI or extra unit tests) AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seem…

> And if it does the entire job, amazing!

Can you explain this line of thinking a bit? I see this a lot but it never makes any sense. It's like being offended about being paid money or feeling that you make too much or that you will be excited once you can get paid minimum wage or better yet just be homeless; I don't see the appeal ...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#90

Post by fragmede »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #87
bsaul wrote: post #38

i'm quite surprised by the level of skepticism in this thread. I've been developping my website + webservice + db only using cursor "composer" mode, not typing a single line of code, and i'm already with something fully functional. I am voluntarely refraining from fixing the bugs myself by digging into the code, just to see how far someone with 0 coding skill can go. And this answer is : as far as a junior / midlevel…

Please, show us the website and the source code - every time I read statement like this, there is no proof.

No, you missed the memo. You're supposed to say they're toy webpages and it doesn't count as "real" programming.

Simonw has plenty of examples on his blog, including full transcripts if you've honestly not seen them before though. https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

A fun one that he didn't bother to post to his blog tho - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505772

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