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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

#521

Post by whatever1 »

wordofx wrote: post #472
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”

Explain to us non-programmers why a 60" request (the default nginx timeout) is ok, but a 61" request is not.

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

#522

Post by captainbland »

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 wild. You can't say this statistical, hyper-generalised system of "AI" is in any way comparable to the outputs of highly specific, highly deterministic machinery. It's like comparing a dice roll to a clock. If anything reviewing engineers now need to "measure the angles" more closely than ever.

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

#523

Post by namaria »

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…

What strikes me the most is not even that people are willing to do that, to just fudge their work until everything is green and call it a day.

The thing that gets me is how everyone is attaching subsidized GPU farms to their workflows, organizations and code bases like this is just some regulated utility.

Sooner of later this whole LLM thing will get monetized or die. I know that people are willing to push bellow par work. I didn't know people were ready to put on the leash of some untested new sort of vendor lock-in so willingly and even arguing this is the way. Some may even have the worst of the two worlds and end up on the hook for a new class of sticker shock, pay down and later have these products fail from under them and left out to dry.

Someone will pay for these models, the investors or the users so dependent they'll pay whatever price is charged.

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

#524

Post by pyrale »

torben-friis wrote: post #232
greesil wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is going to happen when management is pushing on deadlines?

The same thing as always: either a strong tech voice convinces them to invest the required time or corners are cut and we all cry later. But I don’t see how that is made better or worse by AI.

AI impacts the expectations that drive the deadlines and the size of the corners that have to be cut.

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

#525

Post by looofooo0 »

dragandj wrote: post #520
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...

Also serves as a manual on steroids, where you can find example of library usage for your problem.

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

#527

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

Seems like the more distanced we get from actual engineering methods, the more fucked up our software and systems become. Not really surprising to be honest. Just look at the web as an example. Almost everyone is just throwing massive frameworks and a hundred libraries as dependencies together and calls it a day. No wait, must apply the uglyfier! OK now call it a day.

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

#528

Post by grewsome »

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've read previously that certain parts of the software industry at one point was all in on move fast and break things, but then after a while the quality of their code was so bad that they took a different course. Maybe some people didn't get their fill the first time round. I can see that LLMs are going to be quick, I can't see how their code bases are going to do anything but turn into a very bad state, probably much more so this time round.

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

#529

Post by dragandj »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #239
pbw wrote: post #30

Companies 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…

This can only go three ways. The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.) The second is that AI is just about good enough and things…

There are many more scenarios, though. One of them is that AI slop is impressive looking to outsiders, but can't produce anything great on itself, and, after the first wave of increased use based on faith, it just gets tossed in the pile of tools somewhere above UML and Web Services. Something that many people use because "it's the standard" but generally despise because it's crap.

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

#530

Post by zelphirkalt »

lukan wrote: post #510
throwup238 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's filling that role in this brave new world? Us? (Yeah, we’re fucked)

In a world of vibe coders, those who can still debug on their own, will have quite a valuable skill.

I already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"
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