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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#181

Post by saalweachter »

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.

Layout fiddlers make changes people can see and understand.

If your job is massaging data for nebulous purposes using nebulous means and getting nebulous results, that you need to basically be another person doing the exact same thing to understand the value of, there's going to be a whole lot of management saying "Do we really need all those guys over there doing that? Can't we just have like one guy and a bunch of new AI magic?"

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#182

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

chubot wrote: post #160
ActionHank wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.

The funny thing is that "replacing engineers" is framed as cutting costs But that doesn't really lead to any market advantage, at least for tech companies. AI will also enable your competitors to cut costs. Who thinks they are going to have a monopoly on AI, which would be required for a durable advantage? --- What you want to do is get more of the rare, best programmers -- that's what shareholders and execs should b…

If this works at all, they'll be telling AIs to start multiple companies and keeping the ones that work best.

But if that works, it won't take long for "starting companies" and "being a CEO" to look like comically dated anachronisms. Instead of visual and content slop we'll have a corporate stonk slop.

If ASI becomes a thing, it will be able to understand and manipulate the entirety of human culture - including economics and business - to create ends we can't imagine.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#183

Post by lolinder »

dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

Part of the problem is that many working developers are still in companies that don't allow experimentation with the bleeding edge of AI on their code base, so their experiences come from headlines and from playing around on personal projects.

And on the first 10,000 lines of code, the best in class tools are actually pretty good. Since they can help define the structure of the code, it ends up shaped in a way that works well for the models, and it still basically all fits in the useful context window.

What developers who can't use it on large warty codebases don't see is how poorly even the best tools do on the kinds of projects that software engineers typically work on for pay. So they're faced with headlines that oversell AI capabilities and positive experiences with their own small projects and they buy the hype.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#184

Post by pyrale »

dboreham wrote: post #148
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.

That was pretty funny. Bonus points if it was posted by an AI bot.

Damn, if we're also made redundant for posting snickering jokes on HN I'm definitely going to need a new occupation.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#185

Post by newAccount2025 »

One major critique: why do we think junior programmers really learn best from the grizzled veterans? AI coaches can give feedback on what someone is actually seeing and doing, and can be available 24x7. I suspect this can enable the juniors of the future to have a much faster rise to mastery.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#186

Post by pgm8705 »

dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

Yes. I think part of the problem is how good it is at starting from a blank slate and putting together an MVP type app. As a developer, I have been thoroughly impressed by this. Then non-devs see this and must think software engineers are doomed. What they don't see is how terrible LLMs are at working with complex, mature codebases and the hallucinations and endless feedback loops that go with that.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#187

Post by dingnuts »

falcor84 wrote: post #179
lawlessone wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I think something needs to actually experience the world in 3d in real time to understand what it is actually coding things or doing tasks for.

> LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I don't think that anyone is advocating for LLMs to be used "on their own". Isn't it like saying that airplanes are useless "on their own" in 1910, before people had a chance to figure out proper runways and ATC towers?

there was that post about "vibe coding" here the other day if you want to see what the OP is talking about

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#188

Post by badgersnake »

nerder92 wrote: post #155

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change…

> the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves

This is the incorrect assumption, or at least there’s no evidence to support it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#189

Post by Mistletoe »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #166

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - King Solomon Litter, palanquin, and sedan chair carriers were fired. Oarsmen were fired. Horses were fired. . . . [time] . . . COBOL programmers where fired. and, so on. What was the expectation; that programmers will be forever? Lest we forget, barely a century ago, programmers started to push out a large swat…

I was watching How It’s Made last night and watching how pencils were made, thinking how hard this would be and how expensive a pencil would be if a person had to make them and how an endless supply of them can be made this way. Then I thought about how software has allowed us to automate so many things and scale and I realized AI is the final step where we can automate and remove the programmers. Pencil makers were replaced and so will programmers be replaced. Your best hope is being the person running the pencil machine.
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