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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#41

Post by theshrike79 »

input_sh wrote: post #31
theshrike79 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired". But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.

Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers.…

The thing that separates AI Agents from normal programmers is that agents don't get bored or tired.

For most engineers the ability might be there, but the motivation or willingness to write, for example, 20 different test cases checking the 3 line bug you just fixed is fixed FOR SURE usually isn't there. You add maybe 1-2 tests because they're annoying boilerplate crap to write and create the PR. CI passes, you added new tests, someone will approve it. (Yes, your specific company is of course better than this and requires rigorous testing, but the vast majority isn't. Most don't even add the two tests as long as the issue is fixed.)

An AI Agent will happily and without complaining use Red/Green TDD on the issue, create the 20 tests first, make sure they fail (as they should), fix the issue and then again check that all tests pass. And it'll do it in 30 minutes while you do something else.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#42

Post by rel_ic »

input_sh wrote: post #31
theshrike79 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired". But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.

Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers.…

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers.

IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#43

Post by wartywhoa23 »

tern wrote: post #34
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

[flagged]

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#44

Post by v3xro »

The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-using side of this) is strict liability for companies making software products (just like in the physical world). Then it doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and sort out any externalities caused. This will probably mean no vibe-coded side hustles but I personally am OK with that.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#45

Post by hansmayer »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people.

That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be exact to the rounding error. Each time. No matter how many times they use the oven. And they don't have to invent strategies on how to "best use the ovens", they don't claim to "vibe-bake" 10x more than what they used to bake before etc... The semi-automated ovens just effing work!

Now show me an LLM that even remotely provides this kind of experience.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#46

Post by 0x3f »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#47

Post by turblety »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

Maybe the bakery expands to make more than just loaves of bread, maybe different cakes, sandwiches, maybe expand delivery to nearby towns.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#48

Post by hansmayer »

noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

> But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.

Because the instances of this happening are a) random and b) rarely ever happening ?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#49

Post by thefounder »

The issue is that you become lazy after a while and stop “leading the design”. And I think that’s ok because most of the code is just throwaway code. You would rewrite your project/app several times by the time it’s worth it to pay attention to “proper” architecture. I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could focus on everything I wanted to build instead to become a framework developer/engineer.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#50

Post by bojan »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

On another note, if you had 100 engineers and you lay almost all of them off and keep 5 super-AI-accelerated engineers, and your competitor keeps 50 of such engineers, your competitor is still able to iterate 10x as fast. So you still lay people off at the risk of falling behind.
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