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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#271

Post by lolinder »

menaerus wrote: post #249
lolinder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curiou…

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

You edited your comment to clarify that you were asking from a place of ignorance as to the tools. Your original comment read as snarky and I responded accordingly, deleting it when I realized that you had changed yours. :)

> 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.

It doesn't work. Even the models that claim to have really large context windows get very distracted if you don't selectively pick relevant context. That's why I always talk about useful context window instead of just plain context window—the useful context window is much lower and how much you have depends on the type of text you're feeding it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#272

Post by high_na_euv »

nerder92 wrote: post #246
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?

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... )

But some say that Moore Law is dead :)

Anyway, the mumber of tiktok users coorelates with advancements in AI too!

Before tiktok the progress was slower, then when tiktok appeared it progressed as hell!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#273

Post by mola »

I believe regardless of the validity for the AI can replace programmers now narrative, we will see big co squeezing the labor force and padding the companies bottom line and their pocket.

The fact the narrative is false will be the problem of the one who replaces these CEOs, and us workers

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#274

Post by natch »

nirui wrote: post #90

Maybe it's just me boomer reading this, but I think all 3 points listed in the article are more of predictions from the author (with rationals from the author). However, AI today maybe different compare to AI in the future. I'm a programmer, I love my skills, but I really hate to write code (and test etc etc), I don't even want to do system design. If I can just say to a computer "Hey, I got this 55TB change set and…

“author.” hah.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#275

Post by threetonesun »

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…

It’s the “CTO’s nephew” trope but at 100x the cost.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#276

Post by ryandrake »

lolinder wrote: post #202
throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some codebases grown with AI assistance must be getting pretty large now, I think an interesting metric to track would be percent of code that is AI generated over time. Still isn't a perfect proxy for how much work the AI is replacing though, because of course it isn't the case that all lines of code would take the same amount of time to write by hand.

Yeah, that would be very helpful to track. Anecdotally, I have found in my own projects that the larger they get the less I can lean on agent/chat models to generate new code that works (without needing enough tweaks that I may as well have just written it myself). Having been written with models does seem to help, but it doesn't get over the problem that eventually you run out of useful context window. What I have s…

It might not just be helpful but required one day. Depending on how the legality around AI-generated code plays out, it's not out of the question that companies using it will have to keep track of and check the provenance and history of their code, like many companies already do for any open source code that may leak into their project. My company has an "open source review" process to help ensure that developers aren't copy-pasting GPL'ed code or including copyleft libraries into our non-GPL licensed products. Perhaps one day it will be common to do an "AI audit" to ensure all code written complied with whatever the future regulatory landscape shapes up to be.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#277

Post by high_na_euv »

RohMin wrote: post #243
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?

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

The thing is: how much

0.2x, 2x, 5x, 50x?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#279

Post by nerder92 »

Madmallard wrote: post #176
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…

What makes you think (1) will be true? It is only generating based on training data. In mature code bases there is a massive amount of interconnected state that is not already present in any github repository. The new logic you'd want to add is likely something never done before. As other programmers have stated, it seems to be improving at generating useful boilerplate and making simple websites and such related to…

> It is only generating based on training data

This is not the case anymore, current SOTA CoT models are not just parroting stuff from the training data. And as of today they are not even trained exclusively on publicly (and not so publicly) available stuff, but they massively use synthetic data which the model itself generated or distilled data from other smarter models.

I'm using and I know plenty of people using AI in current "mature" codebases with great results, this doesn't mean it does the work while you sip a coffee (yet)

*NOTE: my evidence for this is that o3 could not break ARC AGI by parroting, because it's a banchmark made exactly for this reason. Not a coding banchmark per se, but still transposable imo.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#280

Post by tarkin2 »

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…

Sorry for inadvertently advising but I met a guy who used v0.dev to make impressive websites (although admittedly he did use react before so he was experienced) with professional success. It's more than arguable that his company will fire/hire fewer devs. Of course in a decade or so they'll be a skill gap unless LLMs can fill that gap too.
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