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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

#461

Post by torben-friis »

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…

As the op, for the case I was thinking about, it’s “couldn’t” as in “I don’t have the time to go checking file by file and the variation is not straightforward enough that grepping will surface cases straightforwardly”.

I’m very much able to understand the result and test for consequences, I wouldn’t think of putting code I don’t understand in production.

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

#462

Post by whatever1 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #459
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 t…

I am pretty sure that if I hinted the direction of the solution the model would come up with the simple proxy config fix. I will try it for fun.

But I was trying to simulate the vibe coding experience where you are completely clueless and rely exclusively on the LLM. It works, but it creates even more work (we call it debt) for the future.

PS I was using Claude within Copilot, so it could definitely see the docker & nginx configuration.

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

#463

Post by torben-friis »

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.

Cursor is good as retrieving the appropriate context and baking it into your request, which significantly improves responses and reduces friction. It sometimes pulls generic config or other stuff that I might miss to include in a first attempt

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

#464

Post by mrheosuper »

lolinder wrote: post #360
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…

Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time getting every detail of the design right before it ever made it to the assembly line. Who's filling that role in this brave new world?

it would be the SA guy, but look like he will also be replaced by a bunch of "vibe coder"

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

#465

Post by mrheosuper »

anonzzzies wrote: post #433
decimalenough wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're FTEs, that's not outsourcing, it's moving your employees to a cheaper location. Outsourcing means laying off your FTEs and shoving the entire project over to a WITCH consulting shop.

FTE for lack of a better word: they are not employees of the company, they are full-time working for the company; they are employed by some outsourcing place. FTE I guess means employee of the western country and that they are not, but what would be the term? Full time remote worker?

Maybe you mean "contractor" ?

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

RossBencina wrote: post #318
ModernMech wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by PicassoCTs »

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…

The lead poisoning of our time, companies getting high on hype-tech, killed off because the "freedom from programmers- no code tools" create gordion project nods.

And all because the MBAs yearn for freedom from dependencies and thus reality.

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

#468

Post by doug_durham »

stock_toaster wrote: post #218
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…

I wonder about codebase maintainability over time. I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality. So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased dra…

Up until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired.

Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.

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

#469

Post by da02 »

neom wrote: post #177
philipwhiuk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What type of work does he do that allow him to spend on hobbies? (In other words, "What can I do to be wealthy like your friend?".)

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

#470

Post by alonsonic »

whatever1 wrote: post #462
rafaelmn wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I am pretty sure that if I hinted the direction of the solution the model would come up with the simple proxy config fix. I will try it for fun. But I was trying to simulate the vibe coding experience where you are completely clueless and rely exclusively on the LLM. It works, but it creates even more work (we call it debt) for the future. PS I was using Claude within Copilot, so it could definitely see the docker &…

Sounds like you asked Claude for a fix and it gave you a proper fix to your badly designed api endpoint. If it's an operation that's taking that long then yes, implementing it asynchronously is a good idea.

If what you wanted was a simple ductape quick fix I'm sure you could have asked for that and Claude would have recommended what you did, increasing the timeout window which I guess "fixes" the problem.

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