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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#241

Post by jvanderbot »

chubot wrote: post #140
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, an…

This is an insightful comment. It smells of Jevron's paradox, right? More productivity leads to increased demand.

I just don't remember anyone saying that SO would replace programmers, because you could just copy-paste code from a website and run it. Yet here we are: GPTs will replace programmers, because you can just copy-paste code from a website and run it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#242

Post by robertlagrant »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #171
chubot wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

Google Coding is definitely a real problem. And I can't believe how wrong some of the answers on Stack Overflow are. But the real problems are managerial. Stonks must go up, and if that means chasing a ridiculous fantasy of replacing your workforce with LLMs then let's do that!!!!111!! It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. Maybe the CEOs have decided they don't n…

I don't think this is anyone's plan. It's the biggest argument against why it won't be the plan: who'll pay for all of it? Unless we can Factorio the world, it seems more likely we just won't do that.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#243

Post by RohMin »

high_na_euv wrote: post #198
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…

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. How are you so sure?

I do feel with the rise of "reasoning" class of models, it's not hard to believe that code quality will improve over time.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#244

Post by randmeerkat »

dev1ycan wrote: post #231
high_na_euv wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. How are you so sure?

he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians

> he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians

Don’t hate on it, just spin up some startup with “ai” and LLM hype. Juice that lemon.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#245

Post by sumoboy »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #207
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…

> Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at. This is the only current threat. The time you save as a developer using AI on mundane stuff will get filled by something else, possibly more mundane stuff. A small company with only 2-5 Seniors may not be able to drop anyone. A company with 100 seniors might be able to drop 5-10 of them total, spread across…

I don't think companies realize AI is not free. A 100+ devs, openai, anthropic, gemini API costs, the hidden overhead of costs not spoken about.

Too much speculation that productivity will increase substantially, especially when a majority of companies IT is just so broken and archaic.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#246

Post by nerder92 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #198
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…

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. How are you so sure?

I'm not sure, it's an observation considering how AI improvement is related to Moore's law.

[1](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/nvidia-ceo-says-his-ai-chi...)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#247

Post by aksosnckckd »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #203
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.

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done". I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers. 1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe 2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-savin…

The hard part of development isn’t converting an idea in human speak to idea in machine speak. It’s formulating that idea in the first place. This spans all the way from high level “tinder for dogs” concepts to low level technical concepts.

Once AI is doing that, most jobs are at risk. It’ll create robots to do manual labor better than humans as well.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#248

Post by [deleted] »

whynotminot wrote: post #230
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software…

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#249

Post by menaerus »

lolinder wrote: post #237
menaerus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have to do any preparation steps before you asked from a model to do the large scale change or there were no steps involved? For example, did you simply ask for the change or did you give a model a chance to learn about the codebase. I am genuinely asking, I'm curious because I haven't had a chance to use those models at work.

Not OP, but I've had the same experience, and that's with tools that purport to handle the context for you. And frankly, if you can't automate context, then you don't have an AI tool that can realistically replace a programmer. If I have to manually select which of my 10000 files are relevant to a given query, then I still need to be in the loop and will also likely end up doing almost as much work as I would have to…

I see that you deleted your previous response which was unnecessarily snarky while my question was genuine and simple I suppose.

> And frankly, if you can't automate context,

How about ingesting the whole codebase into the model? I have seen that this is possible with at least one such tool (Devon) and which I believe is using gpt model underneath meaning that other providers could automate this step too. I am curious if that would help in generating more legit large scale changes.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#250

Post by DanielHB »

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…

The only thing I use it for is for small self-contained snippets of code on problems that require use of APIs I don't quite remember out of the top of my head. The LLM spits out the calls I need to make or attributes/config I need to set and I go check the docs to confirm.

Like "How to truncate text with CSS alone" or "How to set an AWS EC2 instance RAM to 2GB using terraform"

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