Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 897 posts

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#171

Post by OptionOfT »

To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR.

I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded.

It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure.

Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and extract more common patterns.

And once you reach the limit of the context window you're essentially suck, as the LLM can no longer keep track of its patches.

English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do, and more importantly, a lot of time and experience precedes code that a senior developer writes.

If you want to have this senior developer 'vibe' code, then you'll need to have a way to be more precise in your prompts, and be able to articulate all learnings from your past mistakes and experience.

And that is incredibly heavy. Remember, this is opposite from answering 'why did you write it like this'. This is an endless list of items that say 'don't do this, but this, in this highly specific context'.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#172

Post by nicolaslem »

biosboiii wrote: post #85
bgwalter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the EU, use this search engine: https://geizhals.eu/ Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.

I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.

In Poland and neighboring countries, Amazon has some serious competition from Allegro.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#173

Post by jevndev »

overgard wrote: post #158

You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that…

I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner.

A slightly less bleak example is data analysis. When I am analyzing some dataset for work or home, being able to skip over the “rote” parts of the work is invaluable. Examples off the top of my head being: when the data isn’t in quite the right structure, or I want to add a new element to a plot that’s not trivial. It still has to be done with discipline and in a way that you can be confident in the results. I’ll generally lock down each code generation to only doing small subproblems with clearly defined boundaries. That generally helps reduce hallucinations, makes it easier to write tests if applicable and makes it easier to audit the code myself.

All of that said, I want to make clear that I agree that your vision of software engineering Becoming LLM code review hell sounds like… well, hell. I’m in no way advocating that the software engineering industry should become that. Just wanted to throw in my two cents

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#174

Post by rwyinuse »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #56
bgwalter wrote: post #34

Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement: https://gmplib.org/ Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.

> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now ... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)

At least for stuff like electronics, random plastic household items etc EU Amazon isn't particularly cheap. Branded stuff costs about the same in many smaller stores, and random Chinese no-name brands can be bought from Aliexpress cheaper.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#175

Post by nagisa »

overgard wrote: post #167

This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees…

Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#176

Post by rwyinuse »

I'm wondering whether most other white collar jobs will turn like this as well. I see lots of articles that have been at least partially written by AI - so there goes most of your average journalist's job. Then there's stuff like marketing and communications, where your output is mostly text and media. Again, something AI can mostly handle based on initial requirements.

Personally I find babysitting AI quite boring. It's easy to just stop caring about the quality of the output when one just is wage slaving it, and the process itself is no longer satisfying.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#177

Post by neom »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #169
neom wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do th…

You're paying $1000 a month to build a web app for fun? This seems like a crazy solution to a situation.

...wait till you find out how much my one friend spends on golf a year!!!!! Hobbies are expensive. This will take about 3 maybe 4 months, and I think i'll enjoy playing it with and so will all my friends and family, so it's worth it I think.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#178

Post by maxnevermind »

talles wrote: post #72

It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.

> It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.

Exactly, but I would go further, anyone who worked in big corps know that other non 'generating new code' part is usually pretty inefficient and I would argue AI is going to change that too. So there will be much less of that abstract yapping in endless meetings or there will be less people involved in that.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#180

Post by pbw »

pbw wrote: post #170
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are…

I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular. But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I…

Another datapoint is working earlier eras sound bad to me: punchcards, assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN. Yes I suspect those people had a blast.
Post reply on HN