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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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811–820 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#811

Post by sneak »

yread wrote: post #657
Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

Nevermind coding where is the llm for legal stuff? Why are all these programmers working on automating their job away instead of those bloodsucking lawyers who charge hundreds of eur per h.

There are many. My friend (a lawyer and a programmer) wrote one from scratch in the basement. This would have been a 4 person startup before.

Re: We mourn our craft

#812

Post by kfn »

Something I've been unable to get any AI agent to do: add HDR support to Xorg.

Certain things like this will be out of the realm of AI, because it doesn't understand the requirements.

Re: We mourn our craft

#813

Post by squirrellous »

Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

If you believe juniors are already not safe, it’s only a question of time before seniors are in the same position. First they came for the socialists, etc etc.

Re: We mourn our craft

#814

Post by BobbyTables2 »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

I miss the simplicity of older hardware.

The original NES controller only contains a single shift register - no other active components.

Today, a wireless thing will have more code than one would want to ever read, much less comprehend. Even a high level diagram of the hardware components involved is quite complex.

Sure, we gained convenience, but at great cost.

Re: We mourn our craft

#815

Post by squirrellous »

It was pretty clear to me after interacting with the first popular ChatGPT version around end of 2022 that all knowledge jobs will be replaced sooner or later. I don’t think coding is somehow special. What we have right now is an intermediate stage where “taste” still matters, but this won’t last forever.

I also believe that when all knowledge jobs are replaced, something fundamental needs to change in society. Trying to anticipate and prepare for that right now is premature.

Re: We mourn our craft

#816

Post by shinryuu »

infp_arborist wrote: post #777
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is just a matter of degree. In a few years (or less) you may not have to "skillfully guide" anything. The agents will just coordinate themselves and accomplish your goals after you give some vague instruction. Will you still feel proud? Or maybe a bit later then agents will come up with their own improvements and just ship them without any input at all. How about then?

Then we can finally turn off the computers and go outside to play with friends.

How do you pay your bills? That's the dark question that's looming in the background.

Re: We mourn our craft

#817

Post by arathis »

The hypocrisy is outstanding.

For years developers have worshipped at the alter of innovation, citing their role in decimating many old industries and crafts as just what we do. Now it’s come for you.

Reap what we sow, people.

Re: We mourn our craft

#818

Post by waterTanuki »

I've noticed a steep decline in software quality as a consumer since Covid, but especially since ChatGPT came out.

That hasn't changed. Whether it's apps that hog too much memory, games that use too much storage, unresponsiveness, or just plain cryptic error messages, everything feels more fraile than it used to be.

Perhaps its the growing pains of LLMs, a horde of junior programmers pushing stuff to production that the seniors were too "old fashioned" to notice.

Only time will tell.

Re: We mourn our craft

#819

Post by throw234234234 »

wtetzner wrote: post #607
JeremyNT wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself. The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it. So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed. I also miss writin…

> why would I ever hire a junior developer Because a junior developer doesn't stay a junior developer forever. The value of junior developers has never been the code they write. In fact, in my experience they're initially a net negative, as more senior developers take time to help them learn. But it's an investment, because they will grow into more senior developers.

The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.

While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.

* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.

* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.

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