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

nytimes.com

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

#291

Post by disqard »

torben-friis wrote: post #184
OptionOfT wrote: post #171

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 ex…

Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinkin…

I'll quote one of the wisest people in tech I know of, Kentaro Toyama:

"Technology acts as an amplifier of human intentions"

...so, if someone is just doing a sloppy job, AI-assisted vibe coding will enable them to do it faster.

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

#292

Post by ModernMech »

Flemlo wrote: post #259
OptionOfT wrote: post #171

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 ex…

A hype is over promising and under delivering. AI is extremely new, impressive and is already changing things. How can that be in any way be similar to crypto and VR?

Yes, it's new and impressive and changing things, but nevertheless it's still underdelivering because the over-promising is out of control. They are selling these things as Ph.D. level researchers that can ace the SAT, pass the MCAT, pass the Bar, yet it still has trouble counting the R's in "strawberry".

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

#293

Post by dabockster »

codr7 wrote: post #204
torben-friis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinkin…

And once AI is not there anymore, you're back on square one. It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation. It's the wrong tool for the job, that's what it is.

> It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation.

It's effective on things that would take months/years to learn, if someone could reasonably learn it on their own at all. I tried vibe coding a Java program as if I was pair programming with an AI, and I encountered some very "Java" issues that I would not have even had the opportunity to get experience in unless I was lucky enough to work on a Fortune 500 Java codebase.

AI doesn't work in a waterfall environment. You have to be able to rapidly iterate, sometimes in a matter of hours, without bias and/or emotional attachment.

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

#294

Post by Jensson »

dabockster wrote: post #293
codr7 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And once AI is not there anymore, you're back on square one. It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation. It's the wrong tool for the job, that's what it is.

> It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation. It's effective on things that would take months/years to learn, if someone could reasonably learn it on their own at all. I tried vibe coding a Java program as if I was pair programming with an AI, and I encountered some very "Java" issues that I would not have even had the opportunity to get experience in unless I was lucky enough to work on a Fortu…

> AI doesn't work in a waterfall environment. You have to be able to rapidly iterate, sometimes in a matter of hours, without bias and/or emotional attachment.

What do you mean? There is no difference between waterfall or agile in what you do during a few hours.

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

#295

Post by dabockster »

neilv wrote: post #192

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to…

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub

That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way?

Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But honestly, our field would be so much healthier overall in the long term.

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

#296

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ath3nd wrote: post #262
_9ptr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.

> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker htt…

Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless.

("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)

Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.

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

#297

Post by dabockster »

neilv wrote: post #247
tkzed49 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".

I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money h…

> accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important"

Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.

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

#298

Post by ModernMech »

OptionOfT wrote: post #171

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 ex…

> English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do

Exactly. And this is why I feel like we are going to go full circle on this. We've seen this cycle in our industry a couple times now:

"Formal languages are hard, wouldn't it be great if we could just talk in English and the computer would understand what we mean?" -> "Natural languages are ambiguous and not precise, wouldn't it be great if we could use a formal langue so that the computer can understand precisely what we mean?"

The eternal hope is that someday, somehow, we will be able to invent a natural language way of communicating something precise like a program, and it's just not going to happen.

Why do I think this? Because we can't even use natural language to communicate unambiguously between intelligent people. Our most earnest attempt at this, the law, is so fraught with ambiguity there's an entire profession dedicated to arguing in the gray area. So what hope do we have controlling machines precisely in this way? Are future developers destined to be equivalent to lawyers, who have to essentially debate the meaning of a program before it's compiled, just to resolve the ambiguities? If that's where this ends up, I will be very sad indeed.

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

#299

Post by billy99k »

dabockster wrote: post #295
neilv wrote: post #192

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to…

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way? Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But h…

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software.

The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.

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

#300

Post by billy99k »

locococo wrote: post #24
timkam wrote: post #15

Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…

A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

It's been like this for awhile now. Aside from companies like Google and Facebook, most companies are using some CRUD web app where the development consists of gluing code together for multiple third-party services and libraries.

It's these sorts of jobs that will be replaced by AI and a vibe coder, which will cost much less because you don't need as much experience or expertise.

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