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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

#311

Post by Nathanba »

ModernMech wrote: post #298
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 pre…

it doesn't have to be precise enough anymore though because a perfect AI can get all the details from the existing code and understand your intent from your prompt.

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

#312

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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…

> 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 doing

Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job.

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

#313

Post by userbinator »

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…

Ironically, I've heard a few people saying they wish the big companies would just copy their publicly available code on GitHub even without attribution instead of coming up with their own overengineered and inefficient solutions which take a lot more time and effort, and which are then forced upon those former people as users.

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

#314

Post by twobitshifter »

jt2190 wrote: post #4

This is interesting: > “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” > This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bys…

As far as vibes go, these guys sound much more negative.

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

#315

Post by RossBencina »

lawgimenez wrote: post #308
dabockster wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I just came out from a cave, what is this vibe coding?

A form of coding by proxy, where the developer instructs (in English prose) an LLM software development agent (e.g. cursor IDE, aider) to write the code, with the defining attribute that the developer never reviews the code that was written.

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

#316

Post by layer8 »

lawgimenez wrote: post #308
dabockster wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I just came out from a cave, what is this vibe coding?

Vibe coding is instructing AI to create/modify an application without yourself looking at or understanding the code. You just go by the "vibe" of how the running application behaves.

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

#317

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

julkali wrote: post #87

I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming: Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing. This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good softwar…

> you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.

"Good" software only matters in narrow use cases--look at how much money and how many contracts companies like Deloitte and Accenture make/have.

Sure, you can't "vibe" slop your way to a renderer for a AAA title, but the majority of F500s have no conception of quality and do not care nor know any "better."

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

#318

Post by RossBencina »

ModernMech wrote: post #292
Flemlo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If I could afford it I'd quite happily employ a Ph.D. level researcher with inability to count the R's in strawberry. The real problem is in accurately characterising where these models fail in relatively subtle task-relevant ways. Hopefully people work that out before they are universally deployed. The overpromising is definitely a problem.

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

#319

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t.

Reading "couldn't" as, you would technically not be able to do it because of the complexity or intricacy of the problem, how did you guarantee that the change offered by the AI made proper sense and didn't leave out critical patterns that were too complex for you to detect ?

Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again if dire consequences are detected way down the line (in a few months for instance), and the problem space is already just not graspable by a mere human. Which sounds really bad if that's the case.

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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