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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#241

Post by tjr »

enos_feedler wrote: post #85
zby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological…

Anecdote: I have decades of software experience, and am comfortable both writing code myself and using AI tools.

Just today, I needed a basic web application, the sort of which I can easily get off the shelf from several existing vendors.

I started down the path of building my own, because, well, that's just what I do, then after about 30 minutes decided to use an existing product.

I have hunch that, even with AI making programming so much easier, there is still a market for buying pre-written solutions.

Further, I would speculate that this remains true of other areas of AI content generation. For example, even if it's trivially easy to have AI generate music per your specifications, it's even easier to just play something that someone else already made (be it human-generated or AI).

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#242

Post by hintymad »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #52

[flagged]

> The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.

I certainly hope so, but it depends on whether we will have more demand for such problems. AI can code out a complex project by itself because we humans do not care about many details. When we marvel that AI generates a working dashboard for us, we are really accepting that someone else has created a dashboard that meets our expectation. The layout, the color, the aesthetics, the way it interacts, the time series algorithms, and etc. We don't care, as it does better than we imagined. This, of course, is inevitable, as many of us do spend enormous time implementing what other people have done. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is very hard to human to repeat other people's work correctly, but it's a breeze for AI. The corollary is that AI will replace a lot of demand on software developers, if we don't have big enough problems to solve -- in the past 20 years we have internet, cloud, mobile, and machine learning. All big trends that require millions and millions of brilliant minds. Are we going to have the same luck in the coming years, I'm not so sure.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#243

Post by vemv »

zozbot234 wrote: post #138

Is this a real article or just AI-generated text? This whole text has a lot of very weird phrasing in it, also it's so strange how it just seems to keep trudging on and on without ever getting to the point. Actual human-written articles are not like this.

As soon as I saw the AI header image I pressed the back button - it's all I need to know.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#244

Post by hintymad »

zby wrote: post #68
jackfranklyn wrote: post #52

[flagged]

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Jevon's Paradox does not last forever in a single sector, right? Take manufacturing business for example. We can make more and more stuff with increasingly lower price, yet we ended up outsourcing our manufacturing and the entire sector withered. Manufacturing also gets less lucrative over the years, which means there has been less and less demand of labor.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#245

Post by rgmerk »

xnx wrote: post #81
jackfranklyn wrote: post #52

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

Key difference being that there is only a certain amount of food that a person can physically eat before they get sick.

I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the amount of software written if it was, say, 20% of its present cost to write it, would be at least 5x what we currently produce.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#246

Post by sysguest »

hintymad wrote: post #244
zby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Jevon's Paradox does not last forever in a single sector, right? Take manufacturing business for example. We can make more and more stuff with increasingly lower price, yet we ended up outsourcing our manufacturing and the entire sector withered. Manufacturing also gets less lucrative over the years, which means there has been less and less demand of labor.

> yet we ended up outsource our factories and the entire sector withered.

hmm outsourcing doesn't contradict Jevon's paradox ?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#247

Post by hintymad »

This wave of AI innovation reveals that a lot of activity in coding turns out to be of accidental complexity instead of essential. Or put it another way, a lot of tasks in coding is conceptual to human, but procedural to AI. Conceptual tasks require intuitive understanding, rigorous reasoning, and long-term planning. AI is not there yet. On the other hand, procedural tasks are low entropy with high priors: once a prompt is given, what follows is almost certain. For instance, one had to learn many concepts to write "public static void main(String[] args)" when writing Java code in the old days. But for AI, the conditional probability Pr(write "public static void main(String[] args)" | prompt = "write the entry method for a given class") is practically 1. Or if I'd like to use Python to implement linear regression, there will be pretty much one way to implement it right, and AI knows about it - nothing magical, but only because we human have been doing so for years and the optimal solution for most of the cases have converged, so it turns into procedural to AI.

Fortunate or unfortunate, many procedural tasks are extremely hard for humans to master, but easy to AI to generate. In the meantime, we structured our society to support such procedural work. As the wave of innovation spreads, many people will rise but many will also suffer.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#248

Post by supriyo-biswas »

akhil08agrawal wrote: post #130
lotu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. Ho…

Exactly. The customer doesn't know what's possible, but increasingly neither do we unless we're staying current at frontier speed. AI can type faster and answer Stack Overflow questions. But understanding what's newly possible, what competitors just shipped, what research just dropped... that requires continuous monitoring across arXiv, HN, Reddit, Discord, Twitter. The gap isn't coding ability anymore. It's informat…

Hey, welcome to HN. I see that you have a few LLM generated comments going here, please don’t do it as it is mostly a place for humans to interact. Thank you.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#249

Post by hintymad »

sysguest wrote: post #246
hintymad wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevon's Paradox does not last forever in a single sector, right? Take manufacturing business for example. We can make more and more stuff with increasingly lower price, yet we ended up outsourcing our manufacturing and the entire sector withered. Manufacturing also gets less lucrative over the years, which means there has been less and less demand of labor.

> yet we ended up outsource our factories and the entire sector withered. hmm outsourcing doesn't contradict Jevon's paradox ?

You're right. I updated it to "in a single sector". The context is about the future demand of software engineers, hence I was wondering if it would be possible that we wouldn't have enough demand for such profession, despite that the entire society will benefit for the dropping unit cost and probably invented a lot of different demand in other fields.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#250

Post by jimbo808 »

hintymad wrote: post #247

This wave of AI innovation reveals that a lot of activity in coding turns out to be of accidental complexity instead of essential. Or put it another way, a lot of tasks in coding is conceptual to human, but procedural to AI. Conceptual tasks require intuitive understanding, rigorous reasoning, and long-term planning. AI is not there yet. On the other hand, procedural tasks are low entropy with high priors: once a pro…

I think we massively downplay the experience and expertise required to ask the right question.
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