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

451–460 of 897 posts

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

#451

Post by misja111 »

My experience with AI so far is exactly the opposite. It can help me with finding configurations to set up software packages, with syntax of programming languages that I use only occasionally so am not too familiar with, or it can give suggestions for improvement for code that I have written. It's like having a personal assistant.

But the interesting work: thinking about software architecture, about implementation strategies for large projects, or about finding a good debugging strategy for bugs in large code bases, that work is still for me.

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

#452

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

While the writing seems to be on the wall for entry level developer positions, there's going to have to be a pathway for Amazon and others to have junior devs become senior devs, and be able up fill in whenever the machines fail.

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

#453

Post by cess11 »

'“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.”'

I don't recognise this at all, not in myself, neither in the well functioning teams I've been a part of.

Executing and reviewing code is the job. That's the core thing we do. Writing code is just a fluent activity, like walking or absentmindedly spinning a pen between the fingers.

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

#454

Post by _ink_ »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…

I agree. I always wondered at what point I will feel old and that I can't keep up with technology. Afterall I grew up with Internet. But this might be it.

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

#455

Post by mrheosuper »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…

>Generative AI feels taboo in education

Nah, only the teachers feel this, Gen AI is extremely popular in students. In fact, you would look weird if you don't use Gen AI for school work.

What we need is teaching them how to use gen AI effectively.

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

#456

Post by whatever1 »

An example from today: I have some scientific calculations that run in a Django app.

One specific endpoint has a function that takes 2-3 minutes to execute. When I was hitting the endpoint I was getting a timeout error. I asked Claude to fix it, and it came up with a huge change in the front end (polling) and backend (celery) to support asynchronous operations.

I instead increased the nginx timeout from 1 minute to 5 minutes. Problem solved without introducing 100x the complexity.

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

#457

Post by _ink_ »

tho234j234234 wrote: post #409

What has been the experience with using these tools for folks on HN. I'm generally amazed at the JS stuff it can come up with from scratch, but asking it to implement features is often not quite great. Far more often it can't even use the damn edit tool given to the LLM! I have to take some of the "excrement" left behind; may be do a git reset; and then carefully fix the code. I'm not surprised the managerial class h…

My experience has been poor. My last attempt was with copilot. I gave it the structure of a psql table and a DTO and asked it to create java code to write to the dB using a prepared statement. It failed and the errors were hard to spot. Not sure if it saved time. That was 4o.

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

#459

Post by rafaelmn »

whatever1 wrote: post #456

An example from today: I have some scientific calculations that run in a Django app. One specific endpoint has a function that takes 2-3 minutes to execute. When I was hitting the endpoint I was getting a timeout error. I asked Claude to fix it, and it came up with a huge change in the front end (polling) and backend (celery) to support asynchronous operations. I instead increased the nginx timeout from 1 minute to 5…

You didn't specify how you asked Claude to fix it here so hard to evaluate if it's giving you what you asked for or just choosing the wrong approach. It's one of the things these models will do - they will narrow down on what you asked them to do - so for example if you just gave it your code without the deployment and said fix it on code level that would bias it to go in that direction, etc.

Disclaimer: not one of those "you didn't prompt right whenever LLMs fail" people, but just something I've noticed in my use of LLMs - they usually don't have the problem context so can't really tell you "should we even be going down this path"

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

#460

Post by Joel_Mckay »

dabockster wrote: post #297
neilv wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based.

It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses.

Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.)

The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3

Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume:

"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla)

https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...

Post reply on HN