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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

#471

Post by simonw »

cess11 wrote: post #453

'“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.…

Yeah, I agree. I said that because I've heard other programmers say it - which I guess is hinted at by the "channeling the objections of other programmers" part of that quote.

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

#472

Post by wordofx »

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…

“I instead put in a hacky solution because I’m not a programmer and didn’t understand the solution or why it might be better”

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

#473

Post by alternatex »

mrheosuper wrote: post #465
anonzzzies wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ?

A lot of those deals between western companies and companies in developing countries are not fixed-time contracts but ongoing collaborations.

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

#474

Post by shakna »

tdeck wrote: post #366
wat10000 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, there are people who carefully ensure that those angles are correct, and that all of the angles result in the car’s occupants arriving at their destination instead of turning into a ball of fire. It’s just that this process takes place at design time, not assembly time. Software the same way. It’s even more automated than auto factories. Assembly is 100% automated. Design is what we get paid to do,…

You're just not visionary enough to see the potential in vibe-CADing an automobile!

I see you're familiar with zoo. [0]

[0] https://zoo.dev/design-studio

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

#475

Post by johnisgood »

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…

> Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again

Not necessarily. It may have refactored the codebase in a way that is more organized and easier to follow.

> 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 ?

Perhaps extensive testing? Or a prayer.

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

#476

Post by strogonoff »

pshc wrote: post #333
makeitdouble wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sometimes a problem is a weird combination of hairy/obscure/tedious where I simply don’t have the activation energy to get started. Like, I could do it with a gun to my head. But if someone else were to do it for me I would gratefully review the merge request.

Reviewing a merge request should require at least the same activation energy as writing the solution yourself, as in order to adequately evaluate a solution you first need to acquire a reference point in mind as to what the right solution should be in the first place.

For me personally, the activation energy is higher when reviewing: it’s fun to come up with the solution that ends up being used, not so fun to come up with a solution that just serves as a reference point for evaluation and then gets immediately thrown away. Plus, I know in advance that a lot of cycles will be wasted on trying to understand how someone else’s vision maps onto my solution, especially when that vision is muddy.

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

#477

Post by johnisgood »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #374
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…

I hear formal Sanskrit has precise logical semantics

I would rather look into the direction of Lojban.

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

#478

Post by whatever1 »

alonsonic wrote: post #470
whatever1 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So would you revamp your entire stack to accommodate one single endpoint and solve a fictional problem?

What is the risk introduced by a long request that requires you to increase to your code complexity by 100x?

Sure I could also dump completely Django and build from scratch with the provision for 10B concurrent users.

My point is that when coding, business context is needed. I was expecting to see from the model what the root cause was and clear statement of the assumptions used when providing the solution. Instead, what I got was "this is a long request, here is the most likely solution for long requests, enjoy your new 1000 loc and dependencies"

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

#480

Post by thih9 »

> The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.

Why generate that memo at all - maybe scattered thoughts would be enough and the AI could help managers understand them. Then again, if the goal is to replace the engineers and not the other way round, then this makes sense.

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