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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#251

Post by smitelli »

dragonwriter wrote: post #233

My opinion: tech isn't firing programmers for AI. If is firing peogrammers because of the financial environment, and waving around AI as a fig leaf to pretend that it is not really cutting back in output. When the financial environment loosens again, there’ll be a new wave of tech hiring (which is about equally likely to publicly be portrayed as either reversing the AI firing or exploiting new opportunities due to AI…

I've come to believe it really is this.

Everybody got used to the way things worked when interest rates were near zero. Money was basically free, hiring was on a rampage, and everybody was willing to try reckless moonshots with slim chances for success. This went on for like fifteen years -- a good chunk of the workforce has only ever known that environment.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#252

Post by daveguy »

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…

Yes, but in all 4 of these steps you are literally describing the job transformer LLMs were designed to do. We are at 1 (mediocre job) for LLMs in coding right now. Maybe 2 in a few limited cases (eg boilerplate). There's no reason to assume LLMs will ever perform at 3 for coding. For the same reason natural language programming languages like COBOL are no longer used -- natural language is not precise.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#253

Post by smitelli »

phren0logy wrote: post #127
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.

I think people aren't getting your joke.

The AI that replaced the people, however, is in stitches.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#255

Post by hennell »

newAccount2025 wrote: post #185

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.

I remember being in maths class with a kid next to me who was a maths wiz. He could see what I was doing, was available to help almost the whole lesson, far easier for me to ask then the teacher who had many other students.

In theory a much faster rise to mastery. In practice I rarely had to actually do the work because he'd help me if I got stuck, and what made sense when he explained it didn't stick because I wasn't really doing it.

I did very badly in my first test that year, and was moved elsewhere.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#256

Post by nerder92 »

badgersnake wrote: post #188
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.

If benchmark means anything in evaluating how model capability progress, the evidence is that all the existing benchmark have been pretty much solved, except FrontierMath (https://epoch.ai/frontiermath)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#257

Post by chucky_z »

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…

$1 for the pencil, $1000 for the line.

That’s the 5% when it does matter.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#258

Post by arrowsmith »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
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…

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…

> 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.

This is exactly what the article says in point 3.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#259

Post by sarchertech »

falcor84 wrote: post #227
dingnuts wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean Karpathy's post discussed on https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 ? If so, I quite enjoyed that as a way of considering how LLM-driven exploratory coding has now become feasible. It's not quite there yet, but we're getting closer to a non-technical user being able to create a POC on their own, which would then be a much better point for them in engaging an engineer. And it will only get be…

Technology to allow business people to create POCs has been around for a long time.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#260

Post by shafyy »

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…

Just because there are these abstractions layers that happened in the past does not mean that it will continue to happen that way. For example, many no-code tools promised just that, but they never caught on.

I believe that there's a "optimal" level of abstraction, which, for the web, seems to be something like the modern web stack of HTML, JavaScript and some server-side language like Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript.

Now, there might be tools that make a developer's life easier, like a nice IDE, debugging tools, linters, autocomplete and also LLMs to a certain degree (which, for me, still is a fancy autocomplete), but they are not abstraction layers in that sense.

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