This type of thing really incentivizes founding a startup. If you are a very senior developer, who needs the corporate stupid factory? You can do a lot of work with half the people and work for yourself.
At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
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Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#782To 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…
In 20 yeas in this market I saw a lot of this. A about 6 years back it was the blockchain crazy. My boss wanted me to put blockchain in everything (so he could market this to our clients). I printed a small sign and left on my desk. Everytime someone asked me about blockchain, I would point the sign "We don't need blockchain!"
Every 5 years or so, there's some new thing that every uncreative product lead decides they absolutely must have, for no other reason than that it's the "in" thing. Web is hot. We need to put our product on the web. Mobile is hot. We need a mobile app. 3D is hot. We need to put 3D in our product. VR is hot. We need to put VR in our product. IoT is hot. We need to put IoT in our product. Blockchain is hot. We need to put blockchain in our product. AI is hot. We need to put AI in our product. It'll keep going on long after we're out of the business.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a good part of the issue. You have the computer that is doing stuff. And you have the software engineer that was hired to make it do the stuff. And the connection between them is the code. That's pretty much the simplistic picture that everyone has. But the truth is that the way the computer works is alien and anything useful becomes very complex. So we've come up with all those abstractions, embed the…
Yep, well put. But to your last part, this is why I think the worst fears I see from programmers (here and in real life) are unlikely to be a lasting problem. If you're right - and I think you are - that the direction things may be headed as-is, with increasingly less sophisticated people relying increasingly more on AIs to build an increasingly large portion of software, is going to result in big messes of unworkabl…
> AIs might really get good enough that none of us write code anymore, in the same way that it's quite rare to write assembly code now.
I don't have much hope for that, because the move from assembly to higher level programming languages is a result of finding patterns that are highly deterministic. It's the same as metaprogramming currently. It's not much about writing the code to solve a problem, but to find the hidden mechanism behind a common class of problems and then solve that instead. Then it becomes easier to solve each problem inside the class. LLMs are not reliable for that.
> 2. We're still writing, editing, and debugging code artifacts, but with much better tools.
I'd put a lot more weight on that, but we've already have a lot of tooling that we don't even use (or replicate across software ecosystems). I'd care much more about a nice debugger for go than LLMs tooling. Or a modern smalltalk.
But as you point out, the issue is not tooling. It's understanding. And LLMs can't help with anything if you're not improving that.
[0]: https://lisp-docs.github.io/cl-language-reference/chap-6/g-c...
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#784Welcome to the club. Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
Yes, this is the nature of being spoiled rotten. I am not a software engineer and have never felt stable in my 30 year career. It always feels like the rug could get pulled out from under me at any time. So what? It is still better than working in coal mine. It is still more interesting than working at a gas station. Hard to feel sorry for people basically complaining the work ping pong table doesn't have quite the q…
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Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, well put. But to your last part, this is why I think the worst fears I see from programmers (here and in real life) are unlikely to be a lasting problem. If you're right - and I think you are - that the direction things may be headed as-is, with increasingly less sophisticated people relying increasingly more on AIs to build an increasingly large portion of software, is going to result in big messes of unworkabl…
> AIs might really get good enough that none of us write code anymore, in the same way that it's quite rare to write assembly code now. I don't have much hope for that, because the move from assembly to higher level programming languages is a result of finding patterns that are highly deterministic. It's the same as metaprogramming currently. It's not much about writing the code to solve a problem, but to find the hi…
I probably should have specified: I didn't list those in the order of what I put most weight on. I agree with you that I more heavily weight the one I wrote as #2.
I think you and I probably mostly agree on where things are heading, except that just inferring from your comment, I might be more bullish than you on how much AIs will help us develop those "much better tools".
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back In my experience it is human nature to think you are doing something that people around you can't or don't understand. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people is an old saying. Sometimes the people you report to are morons, but if you consis…
> graveyard is full of irreplaceable people I am not special and make no claims of it; I am entirely replaceable and I'd make no claims to the contrary. This has nothing to do with me or anyone like me, and everything to do with the "adult daycare" style of project managers. I'm tired of re-iterating to non-technical project managers that status of tickets, why things are "blocked" or why the ask isn't feasible given…
Project Manager here. I wish software were an industry where my job was not needed! Where the software team could just directly tell the boss: "It will be done in 3 months. Trust us, bro!" and they go off to do work without a single status report or a single meeting, and come back exactly 3 months later with a finished, tested and working product, ready for distribution! God that would be so great. I could just chill out, tell my boss and boss's boss to chill out, that the software team's got this, with 100% confidence that it was true. Or, I could go find some more useful career!
But it's never true. Team A depends on Team B, who is busy with work for Team C, and none of these teams are talking to each other because they're too busy writing code. Team D just lost two people and can't make the date that they promised, which sets Teams E and F back a few months unless we can figure it out. Or they're behind because they up and decided to do a big refactoring in the middle of the project without telling anyone. Or people just estimated poorly, like orders-of-magnitude poorly, and while the marketing team is ready, and the trade shows are scheduled, and the factory is ramping the device that the software should be flashed on, but the software won't be ready for another three months.
I empathize with engineers since I was once one, and can understand why some of them see us as adversarial. We tend to interact with them in places that Software Engineers hate, like in meetings and standups and via "update" E-mail blasts. Or we're sending them JIRA tickets which they also hate. I do my best to shield my teams from these things that I know they don't like, but sometimes they have to happen.
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was not even imaginable at all just a few years ago. It doesn't matter if it's not working perfect yet. It's only a few years got 3 came out. Having a reasonable chat with a computer was also not possible at all. AI right now already feels like another person. You bought gasoline for the first cars in a pharmacy.
Sed was released in 1973. Changing a number in a config file with regex has been easily possible for over fifty years
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Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#788To 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…
Makes me wonder if we’ll see more emphasis on loosely coupled architecture as a result of this. Software engineers maintain the structure, and AI codes it chaos at the leaf. Similar to how data engineers commoditized data via the warehouse
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried it too and I know this test for a while. Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German. And I often switch between English and German for single words just because ai is already that good. This wasn't even imaginable a few years back. We had 0 technology for that. I created single page html Javascript pages for small prototypes withhin 10 minutes with very little repromting. I can literally…
> I tried it too and I know this test for a while. Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German. You're missing the point though. If it worked for you when you tried it, that's great, but we know these tools are stochastic, so that's not enough to call it "solved". That I tried it and it didn't work tells me it's not. And that's actually worse than it not working at all, because it leads to the fa…
I believe we are seeing the new car, Internet etc
And we live now in such a fast pace that it feels like Ai should be perfect already and it's of course not.
I also see that an expert can leverage Ai a lot better because you still need to know enough to make good things without.
But Ai progresses very fast and still has achieved things were we have not had any answer than before.
What it can already do is still very aligned of what I assume/expect it from the current hype.
Llama made our ocr 20% better just by using it. I prompted plenty of code snippets and stuff which saved me time and was fun using it. Including python scripts for a small ml pipeline and I normally don't write python.
It's the first tech demo ever which people around me just 'got' after I showed it to them.
It's the first chatbot I have seen which doesn't flake out after my second question.
Chatgpt pushed billions into new computer. Blackwell is the first chip to hit the lower estimation for brain compute performance.
It changed the research field of computer linguistics.
I believe it's fundamental to keep a very close eye on it and trying things out regular otherwise it will over roll us suddenly.
I really enjoy using Claude.
Edit: and eli5 on research paper. That's so so good
Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
#790But they mean general warehouse work, or “Amazon Warehouse” work?
Because it’s quite different…