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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#51

Post by geraneum »

batuhandumani wrote: post #28

Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…

> The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#52

Post by EZ-E »

Firing developers to replace by AI, how does that realistically work?

Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the proper fix?

I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. If anything AI empowers to write more code, faster, and with more code running live eventually there are more products to maintain, more companies launched and you need more engineers.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#53

Post by Zealotux »

adamors wrote: post #21
ponector wrote: post #10

>>companies aren’t investing in junior developers It was a case before AI as well. Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online

Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit... It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.

It's not related to engineering issues but rather the ideological shift and the fact that it became a blatant propaganda machine for its new overlord.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#54

Post by UndefinedRef »

hassleblad23 wrote: post #17
UndefinedRef wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

D̴i̴d̴n̴t̴ ̴f̴i̴r̴e̴ ̴a̴n̴y̴o̴n̴e̴ ̴p̴e̴r̴ ̴s̴e̴,̴ ̴b̴u̴t̴ ̴I̴ ̴a̴m̴ ̴a̴ ̴s̴o̴l̴o̴ ̴d̴e̴v̴e̴l̴o̴p̴e̴r̴ ̴a̴n̴d̴ ̴I̴ ̴c̴a̴n̴ ̴d̴o̴ ̴t̴h̴e̴ ̴w̴o̴r̴k̴ ̴o̴f̴ ̴2̴ ̴p̴e̴o̴p̴l̴e̴ ̴n̴o̴w̴ Edit: I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now.

Could have been "I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now."

I like that better

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#55

Post by Draiken »

ponector wrote: post #10

>>companies aren’t investing in junior developers It was a case before AI as well. Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online

Being privately owned by a man with near infinite resources means it can stay online however long its owner wants, whether it's successful or not.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#56

Post by kypro »

outime wrote: post #4

Has there been any company so far that has fired 100% of their programmers to replace them with AI?

Small companies, yes, absolutely.

If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI.

I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI.

In our case the complexity of some of these projects and the limited ability of AI means that they're typically creating more bugs and tech debt for us to fix and are not really saving themselves any time – and this is certainly going to be true at the moment for any large project. However, if you're paying programmers just to manage the content of a few small websites it probably begins to make sense to use AI instead.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#57

Post by Nullabillity »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…

This is like arguing that surely we can get rid of all our formers as soon as we have a widespread enough caste of priests.

There is no such thing as "prompt engineering", because there is no formal logic to be understood or engineered into submission. That's just not how it works.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#58

Post by snackbroken »

baq wrote: post #39
batuhandumani wrote: post #28

Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…

Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.

Once AI achieves runaway self improvement, it will be subject to natural selection pressures. This does not bode well for any organisms competing in its niche for data center resources.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#59

Post by EZ-E »

entropyneur wrote: post #26

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

Agreed, hiring has slowed down but this seems more caused by the end of the zero interest rate era. At most I see low level copywriting and low level translation jobs in danger where it is a simpler input/output job flow

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#60

Post by mrkeen »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…

We also managed to get rid of JavaScript like 15 years ago, with major backend technologies providing their own compile-to-js frameworks.

But JS outlived them, because it's the whole write-run-read-debug cycle, whereas the frameworks only gave you write-run.

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