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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#131

Post by Gerardo1 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #124
osigurdson wrote: post #116

It seems that a lot of companies are skating where they hope the puck to go instead of hedging their bets for an uncertain future. Personally I would at least wait until the big AI players fire everyone before doing the same.

They are skating where bleachers full of hype men are screaming that the puck will go.

I think the common theme is that a lot of people: meaning both people in the community, like here on HN, and people making decisions in industry, are treating AI today as if it's what they hope it will be in five years.

That's a very leveraged bet, which isn't always the wrong call, but I'm not convinced they are aware that that's what they're doing.

I think this is different from the usual hype cycle.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#132

Post by Havoc »

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway.

Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#133

Post by makerofthings »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

Part of my work is rapid prototyping of new products and technology to test out new ideas. I have a small team of really great generalists. 2 people have left over the last year and I didn't replace them because the existing team + chatGPT can easily take up the slack. So that's 2 people that didn't get hired that would have done without chatGPT.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#134

Post by greentxt »

soco wrote: post #95
bigfatkitten wrote: post #19

For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there. It is the latter class who are in real danger.

But the question is, are we there yet? I have yet to hear of an AI bot who can eat up a requirement and add said new form in the right place, or fiddle with a layout. Do you know any? So all those big promises you read right now are outright lies. When will we reach that point? I don't do gambling. But we are not there, regardless what the salespeople or fancy journalists might be claiming all day long.

Pizza maker will not be the first job automated away. Nor will janitor. Form fiddlers are cheap and can be blamed. AI fiddlers can be blamed too but are not cheap, yet.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#135

Post by 3s »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

For a lot of tasks like frontend development I’ve found that a tool like cursor can get you pretty far without much prior knowledge. IMO (and experience) many tasks that previously required to hiring a programmer or designer with knowledge of the latest frameworks can now be replaced by one motivated “prompt engineer” and some patience

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#136

Post by SirFatty »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

Zuckerberg said it.

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuckerberg-plans-to-repla...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#137

Post by lxgr »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #18
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, in fact, not online. It redirects to something called X, which is not Twitter.

One would hope that hackers understand the distinction between name and referent.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#138

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #64
BossingAround wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?

I am not a prompt engineer, but I have basically been using ChatGPT, in place of where I used to use StackOverflow. It’s nice, because the AI doesn’t sneer at me, for not already knowing the answer, and has useful information in a wide range of topics that I don’t know. I have learned to create a text file, and develop my questions as detailed documents, with a context establishing preamble, a goal-oriented body, and…

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#139

Post by philipov »

GuB-42 wrote: post #118
pyrale wrote: post #11

We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

> We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision. Also known as programmers. The "AI" part is irrelevant. Someone with expertise in transmitting specifications to a computer is a programmer, no matter the language. EDIT: Yep, I realized that it could be the joke, but reading the other comments, it wasn't obvious.

whoosh! (that's the joke)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#140

Post by chubot »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

We'll probably never have evidence either way ... Did Google and Stack Overflow "replace" programmers?

Yes, in the sense that I suspect that with the strict counterfactual -- taking them AWAY -- you would have to hire 21 people instead of 20, or 25 instead of 20, to do the same job.

So strictly speaking, you could fire a bunch of people with the new tools.

---

But in the same period, the industry expanded rapidly, and programmer salaries INCREASED

So we didn't really notice or lament the change

I expect that pretty much the same thing will happen. (There will also be some thresholds crossed, producing qualitative changes. e.g. Programmer CEOs became much more common in the 2010's than in the 1990's.)

---

I think you can argue that some portion of the industry "got dumber" with Google/Stack Overflow too. Higher level languages and tech enabled that.

Sometimes we never learn the underlying concepts, and spin our wheels on the surface

Bad JavaScript ate our CPUs, and made the fans spin. Previous generations would never write code like that, because they didn't have the tools to, and the hardware wouldn't tolerate it. (They also wrote a lot of memory safety bugs we're still cleaning up, e.g. in the Expat XML parser)

If I reflect deeply, I don't know a bunch of things that earlier generations did, though hopefully I know some new things :-P

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