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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#331

Post by thechao »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
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…

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#332

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#333

Post by neom »

shafyy wrote: post #260
whynotminot wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly.

My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engineers" (whatever that means).

I'm pretty handy with tech, I mean last time I built anything real was the 90s but I know how most things work pretty well. I sat down to ship an app last weekend, no sleep and Monday rolling around GCP was giving me errors and I hadn't realized one of the files the LLMs wrote looked like code but was all placeholder.

I think this is basically what the anthropic report says, automation issues happen via displacement, and displacement is typically fine, except the displacement this time is happening very rapidly (I read in different report, expecting traditionally ~80 years of displacement happens in ~10 years with AI)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#335

Post by 999900000999 »

I have to disagree with this article. Companies as is, particularly larger companies have a lot of fluff. People who do about three or four hours of work a week, and effectively just sit around so senior management can claim they have so many people working on such and such project.

With AI, you no longer need those employees to justify your high valuations. You don't need as many juniors. The party is over tell the rest of the crew. I wouldn't advise anyone to get into tech right now. I know personally my wages have been stagnant for about 5 years. I still make fantastic money, and it's significantly more than the average American income, but my hopes and dreams of hitting 300 or 400k total comp in retiring by 40 are gone.

Instead I've more or less accepted I'm going to have to keep working my middle class job, and I might not even retiring till my '50s! Tragic.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#336

Post by whynotminot »

chucky_z wrote: post #257
whynotminot wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes this is what people like to think. It’s not really true in practice.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#337

Post by ge96 »

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…

A friend of mine reached out with some code ChatGPT wrote for him to trade crypto. It had so much random crap in it and lines would say "AI enhanced trading algo" and it was just an np.randomint line. It was pulling in random deps not even used.

I get it though like I'm terrible working with IMUs and I want to just get something going but I can't there's that wall I need to overcome/learn eg. the math behind it. Same with programming helps to have the background knowing how to read code and how it works.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#338

Post by gilbetron »

bloomingkales wrote: post #91
adamors wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit... It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.

It's arguably depreciating in value faster than a new car. One of Elmo's worst judgement calls (and that's saying a lot). Altman jabbed at Elmo and offered 9billion for X, 1/4th the price Elmo paid. It's kind of hilarious watching the piranhas go at each other: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-reportedly-offers-9...

It arguably got him to be effectively an unelected President (at least for now), the investment has largely paid off scarily.

For twitter as a business? Awful.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#340

Post by MattGaiser »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
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…

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…

Or assuming software needs to be of a certain quality.

Software engineers 15 years ago would have thought it crazy to ship a full browser with every desktop app. That’s now routine. Wasteful? Sure. But it works. The need for low level knowledge dramatically decreased.

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