we'll see if this increased return for companies will stay there in the long term, or create unforeseen consequences.
At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
491–500 of 897 posts
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#492Is 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…
Yes, big-tech-internally I also see a lot of desire to get us to come up with some great AI achievements, but they are so far not achieving far far more than already existing automations and bots and code generators can do for us
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#493Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…
The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me. For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead. Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager! No…
The fun part for me was coming up with ideas for new things, then architecting those things, creating the high level systems to implement them, and iterating on them to make them better. Figuring out why some test harness wasn't mocking some random thing correctly, remembering which api call had which syntax, or just writing a bajillion almost-boilerplate endpoints was always drudgery and I'm glad to be rid of it.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#494Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…
The game is live within your means and max out your retirement fund with index funds. Then you own a slither of that production.
This will work until the capitalists realize the stock market let's plebs do well and they'll unlist the best companies.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#495Investing in AI companies is the best thing one could do now
You just need to figure out which companies capture the value, if any. My bet is on Amazon, funny enough.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#496It 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.
We don't have meaningful metrics that are objective. KLOC is bad but at least it means something concrete, issues closed or PRs submitted is essentially meaningless. This is a software engineering problem not an AI problem.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#497> [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?
> Who's filling that role in this brave new world?
Us?
(Yeah, we’re fucked)
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#498> [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…
Something I've been thinking about is that most claims of AI productivity apply just as well (and more concretely and reliably) to just... better tooling and abstractions Code already lets us automate work away! I can stamp out ten instances of a component or call a function ten times and cut my manual labor by 90% I'm not saying AI has nothing to add, but the "assembly line" analogies - where we precisely factor out…
100%. I keep thinking this, and sometimes saying it.
Sure, if you're stuck in a horrible legacy code base, it's harder. But you can _still_ automate tedious work, given you can manage to put in the proverbial stop for gas. I've seen loads of developers just happily copy paste things together, not stopping to wonder if it was perhaps time to refactor.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#499Earlier 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!
You joke, but there are plenty of companies working on something similar to this, for example:
https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/technology/generative-desig...
I haven't touched CAD for a couple of years, but I get the impression that (inevitably) the generative design hype significantly exceeds the current capability.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?
I spent 2000-2015ish as a Perl programmer, which meant I spent most of that time working for a small number of e-commerce and SaaS companies who had large codebases that had mostly been written around 2005 with some hair-raising tech practices. Nursing a nasty codebase to health bit by bit can be very rewarding.
As long as you don't have pressure to just ship X Y Z as you are doing it, in a team of 20 so any nursing you do is quickly undone by the team and its pressure to ship some half thought out feature.