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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

#371

Post by mji »

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.

> 'generating new code' is a small part of the job

I think this attitude has been taken too far to the point that people (especially senior+ engineers) end up spending massive amounts of time debating and aligning things that can just be done in far less time (especially with AI, but even without it). And these big companies need to change that if they want to get their productivity back. From the article:

> One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas."

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

#372

Post by shusaku »

Nathanba wrote: post #311
ModernMech wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree with this. People use natural language all the time for programs. Talking to a teammate when pair programming, clients asking for features in language to developers. Details are there in the existing code and through a running conversation. This is why I like a lot to code with ChatGPT over a copilot type of setup.

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

#373

Post by bgwalter »

agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

Amazing. What has Harper Reed written? Does he have any significant output?

This is frankly the most idiotic statement I have heard about programming yet.

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

#374

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

I hear formal Sanskrit has precise logical semantics

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

#375

Post by adonese »

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…

Is cursor _that_ good on monorepo? My use with AI so far has been the chat interface. I provide a clear description of what i want and manually copy paste it. Using copilot, I couldn't buy their agentic mode nor adding files to the chat' session context. Gemini' large context has been really good handling large context, but still doesn't help much in refactoring.

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

#376

Post by Aeolun »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #356
bdangubic wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. this matches the description of every codebase (except one) I came across in my 30-year career

Then you had some very shitty jobs. Good teams put time and effort in architecture before development. LLMs will produce code with good structure, as long as you provide that architecture before hand.

Good teams are few and far between. I guess most of them are made over time.

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

#377

Post by Aeolun »

adonese wrote: post #375
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…

Is cursor _that_ good on monorepo? My use with AI so far has been the chat interface. I provide a clear description of what i want and manually copy paste it. Using copilot, I couldn't buy their agentic mode nor adding files to the chat' session context. Gemini' large context has been really good handling large context, but still doesn't help much in refactoring.

If you can feed it the right context. Though I’m sure it’s more the model than Cursor doing the work. Cursor just makes it easy to apply and review.

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

#378

Post by hackable_sand »

mullingitover wrote: post #350
larodi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, in all honesty, a lot of code that actually works in production, and delivers... goods, services, etc. is an over patched mess of code snippets. that sad part is that cpus are so powerful that it works.

Software is a gas that expands to fill its container.

Probably closer to compacting cats into a room.

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

#379

Post by agentultra »

agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

It’s almost like he doesn’t know what a programming language is or what a compiler is for.

Agree, this comment makes no sense.

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

#380

Post by Aeolun »

makeitdouble wrote: post #319
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…

> 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 dir…

I think, if it’s similar to how I feel about it, that it’s more about always being able to do it, but not wanting to expend the mental effort to correctly adjust all those 30 places. Your boss is not going to care, so while it’s a bit better going forward, justifying the time to do it manually doesn’t make sense even to yourself.

If you can do it using an LLM in a few hours however, suddenly making your life, and the lives of everyone that comes after you, easier becomes a pretty simple decision.

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