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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

#511

Post by gitaarik »

bdangubic wrote: post #342
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…

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

But that is for different reasons. There are definitely human created codebases that are clean, that no AI could match.

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

#512

Post by [deleted] »

andyferris wrote: post #421
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 correct analogy is that software engineers design and build the _factory_. The software performs the repeatable process as defined by code, and no person sits and watches if each machine instruction is executed correctly. Do you really want your auto tool makers to not ensure the angle of the tools are correct _before_ you go and build 10,000 (misshaped) cars? I’m not saying we don’t embrace tooling and automatio…

[deleted]

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

#513

Post by n_ary »

> Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.”

Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't get it. Also, I want to see Andy Jassy start writing some codes or fixing issues/bugs for next 5-10 years and have those reviewed by anonymous engineers before I take any word from him. These marketers/sales sleezy dudes claim garbage about things they do not do or know how to do but media picks up everything they say. It is like my grandmother who never went to school starts telling me about how brain surgery is slow and needs productivity else more people will die and those doctors need to adapt. Shameless behavior of these marketing/sales idiots as well as the dark side of media has reached new extreme in this AI bubble.

Meanwhile, I can see from comments how a lot of HNers totally agree everything this salesy guy says as holy bible verse and my colleague is sending me freaked out texts about how he is planning to switch career as Amazon Super Boss is talking about vibe coding now but became calm after I told him, these dudes are mostly sales/MBA who never wrote code of fixed issues, same way our PO doesn't know the diff between var and const.

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

#514

Post by lawgimenez »

ggregoire wrote: post #335
lawgimenez wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just came out from a cave, what is this vibe coding?

Might not be the case for the senior devs on HN, but for most people in this industry, it's copy/pasting a jira ticket into a LLM, which generates some code that seems to work and a ton of useless comments, then pushing it on github without even looking at it once and then moving to the next ticket.

Sounds terrifying.

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

#515

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

That's a weird / wrong analogy. Software engineers design and program the robots, they don't build the cars.

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

#516

Post by Cthulhu_ »

brundolf wrote: post #438
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…

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…

Exactly that. Software development isn't about writing code, never was, it's about what code to write. Doesn't matter if I type in the code or tell an AI what code it should type.

I'll admit that assuming it's correct, an AI can type faster than me. But time spent typing represents only a fraction of the software development cycle.

But, it'll take another year or two on the hype cycle for the gullible managers being sold AI to realise this fully.

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

#517

Post by krisoft »

throwup238 wrote: post #497
lolinder wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I mean the process either works, or it doesn’t. Meaning it either brings in the expected value with acceptable level of defects or it doesn’t.

From a higher up’s perspective what they do is not that different from vibe coding anyway. They pick a direction, provide a high level plan and then see as things take shape, or don’t. If they are unhappy with the progress they shake things up (reorg, firings, hirings, adjusting the terminology about the end goal, making rousing speeches, etc)

They might realise that they bet on the wrong horse when the whole site goes down and nobody inside the company can explain why. Or when the hackers eat their face and there are too many holes to even say which one they did come through. But these things regularly happen already with the current processes too. So it is more of a difference in degree, not kind.

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

#518

Post by HenryBemis »

pchristensen wrote: post #406
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…

Harper talks a lot about using defensive coding (tests, linters, formal verification, etc) so that its not strictly required to craft and understand everything. This article (and several that follow) explain his ideas better than this out of context quote. https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

The issue is that, (the way I see it happening more and more in the real world): - tests are ran by machines - linters are (being) replaced by machines/SaaS services (so.. machines) - formal verification: yes - SHure, 5 people will review the thousands lines of code written every day, in a variety of languages/systems/stacks/scripts/RPAs/etc. or they will simply check that the machines return "green-a-OK" and ask the release team to push it to production.

The other thing that I have noticed, is that '(misplaced) trust erodes controls'. "hey the code hasn't broke for 6 months, so let's remove ABC and DEF controls", and then boom goes the app (because we used to test integration but 'come on - no need for that).

Now.. this is probably the paranoid (audit/sec) in me, but stuff happens, and history repeats itself.

Also.. Devs are cost center, not a profit center. They are "value enablers" not "value adders". Like everything and everyone else, if something can be replaced with something 'equally effective' and cheaper, it is simply a matter of time.

I feel that companies want to both run for this new gold-rush, while at the same time do it slowly and see if this monster bites (someone else first).

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

#519

Post by dragandj »

lvturner wrote: post #307
billy99k wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that…

>> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you. But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation? Maybe some people are getting some money,…

Sure, but if you have a strong copyright infringement case, couldn't you team up with a litigating company and take on Amazon? I am not sure that in any industry any tiny mom and pup shop can take on the largest corporate player without any cooperation from complementary interests...

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

#520

Post by dragandj »

misja111 wrote: post #451

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 st…

In other words, AI is just a replacement for google search and Stack Overflow, automated and served as an IDE plugin...
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