Live data from Hacker News

Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

341–350 of 886 posts

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#341
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.

What job title are you thinking of using?

AI Whisperer

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#342
post #67

Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy. Take banking for example. ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking." Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer. Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades. It's actually shocking how little network enab…

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#343
I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly gobsmacked by how many companies are stuck on way past EOL libraries because of bad architecture decisions. Or can't deal with heinous noisy neighbour issues without spending through the nose on AWS because of bad architecture decisions. Or are spending the farm to rewrite part of the stack that can't perform well enough to land enterprise clients, but the rewrite is going to potentially bankrupt the company... because of bad architecture decisions. This shit happens ALL THE TIME. Even to very big companies!

The tech debt situation is going to become so, so much worse. My guess is there will be a whole lot of "dead by year five" companies built on AI.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I don't think my comment read as snarky but I was surprised to see the immediate downvote which presumably came from you so I only added the last sentence. This is a stupid way of disagreeing and attempting to shut down the discussion without merits.

> 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.

I thought Devon is able to pre-process the whole codebase and which it could take up to a one single day for larger codebases so it must be doing something, e.g. indexing the code? If so, this isn't a context-window specific thing, it's something else and it makes me wonder how that works.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> more sophisticated tech stacks

Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#348

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 agree. It's the current generation's version of what happened with the advent of Javascript frameworks about 15 years ago, when suddenly web devs stopped learning how computers actually work. There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing, can debug complex code bases, and can make appropriate decisions about how to apply technology to business problems. That said, AI a…

> There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing

Unfortunately they won’t be found due to horrible tech interviews focused on “culture” (*-isms), leetcode under the gun, or resume thrown in trash at first sight from lack of full degree. AMHIK.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#349

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…

Yea, every progeammer should write at least a cpu emulator in their language of choice, its such a undervalued exercise that will teach you so much about how stuff really works.

You can go to the next step. I studied computer engineering not computer science in college. We designed our own CPU and then implemented it in an FPGA.

You can go further and design it out of discrete logic gates. Then write it in Verilog. Compare the differences and which made you think more about optimizations.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#350
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…

> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.

Airplane manufacturers have proved themselves more than willing to sacrifice safety for profits. What makes you think they would stop short of using LLMs?

Post reply on HN