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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

#631

Post by redtaperat »

lodovic wrote: post #432
redtaperat wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of several shortcomings I’ve encountered in all major LLMs. The llm has consumed multiple versions of SDKs from the same manufacturer and cannot tell them apart. Mixing up apis, methods, macros, etc. Worse is that for more esoteric code with fewer samples, or more wrong than right answers in the corpus means always getting broken code. I had this issue working on some NXP embedded code.

We have MCP servers to solve that (and Context7)

I see those as carefully applied bandaids. But maybe that’s how we need to use AI for now. I mean we’re burning a lot of tokens to undo mistakes in the weights. That can’t be the right solution because it doesn’t scale. IMO.

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

#632

Post by bumby »

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…

>It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct

To someone who used to automate assembly plants, sounds to me as a rationalization of someone who has never worked in manufacturing. Quality people rightly obsess over whether or not the machine is making “every angle” correct. Imagine trying to make a car where parts don’t fit together well. Software tends to have even more interfaces, and more failure modes.

I’ve also worked in software quality and people are great at rationalizing reasons for not doing the hard stuff, especially if that means confronting an undesired aspect of their identity (like maybe they aren’t as great of a programmer as they envision). We should strive to build processes that protect us from our own shortcomings.

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

#633

Post by nurettin »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #600
lukan wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are least for a few more generations of model. I just finished creating a multiplayer online party game using only Claude Code. I didn't edit a single line. However, there is no way someone who doesn't know how to code could get where I am with it. You have to have an intuition on the sources of a problem. You need to be able to at least glance at the correct and understand when and where the AI is flailing, so you k…

I was thinking of that, but asking the right questions and learning the problem domain just a little bit "getting the gist of things" will help a complete newbie to generate code for a complex software.

For example in your case there is the concept of message routing where a message that gets sent to the room is copied to all the participants.

You have timers, animation sheets, events, triggers, etc. A question that extracts such architectural decisions and relevant pieces of code will help the user understand what they are actually doing and also help debug the problems that arise.

It will of course take them longer, but it is possible to get there.

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

#634

Post by kayodelycaon »

bckr wrote: post #614
HenryBemis wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Devs are cost center, not a profit center. They are "value enablers" not "value adders". I don’t understand this and I think it would require breaking my brain in order to. A person pays the company to provide a service. The developers create and maintain (part of) that service.

It’s pretty simple. Software quality isn’t on spreadsheet. The cost to build it is.

The value of the products coming from research and development are not on the spreadsheet everyone is looking at. The cost to develop them is.

If it’s not on the spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist to the people who make the decisions about money. They have orders to cut spending and that’s what they’ll do.

This may sound utterly insane, but business management is a degree and job. Knowledge about what you are managing is secondary to knowing how to manage.

That’s why there is an entire professional class of people who manage the details of a project. They also don’t need to know what they are getting details for. Their job is to make numbers for the managers.

At no point does anyone actually care what these numbers mean for the company as a whole. That’s for executives.

Many executives just look at spreadsheets to make decisions.

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

#635

Post by bumby »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #605
RossBencina wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole auto factory thing sounds completely misinformed to me. Just because a machine made it does not mean the output isn't checked in a multitude of ways. Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. Machines are maintained. Machine parts are swapped out long before they lead to out-of-tolerance work. Process outputs are statistically characterised, measured and monitored. Measurement equipment is r…

It’s been said that every jetliner that is in the air right now has a 1in hairline fracture in it somewhere? But that the plane is designed for the failure of any one or two parts? Software doesn’t exactly work the same way. You can make “AI” that operates more like [0,1] but at the end of the day the computer is still going to {0,1}.

You can build redundancies into software similar to what you’re alluding to in airplanes. Some safety critical applications require it.

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

#636

Post by ath3nd »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #344
ath3nd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of: A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000 Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.... Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a so…

Let me ask you this, do software engineers in unions enjoy more benefits and compensation than those not in Unions?

A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money.

Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.

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

#637

Post by yapyap »

Sounds like employees have just started turning into accountability sinks, you let the AI do all the work, give the employee not enough time to really read / understand it all and then blame the employee who “pushed” it for not catching a bug instead of being accountable yourself if you let an AI code it all.

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

#638

Post by [deleted] »

close04 wrote: post #602
alpaca128 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.

You misconstrue the analogy. The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. The robot operates deterministically, it has a fixed input and a fixed output. This is what makes it reliable. Your “AI coder” is nothing like that. It’s non deterministic on its best day, and it gets everything thrown at it so even more of a coin toss. This seriously undermines any expectation…

[deleted]

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

#640

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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