Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bitter Prediction

4zm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 189 posts

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#101

Post by eru »

xg15 wrote: post #81
blackbear_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity at work is well correlated with enjoyment of work, so the industry better look for people who enjoy programming. The realization that productive workers aren't just replaceable cogs in the machine is also a bitter lesson for businessmen.

I think the lifelong dream of many businesspeople is to create the perfect "cog in the machine" or ideally run a business without workers at all. (Tony Stark, Elon Musk's role model, is a good example of that. As far as the movies are concerned, he builds all his most important inventions himself, or with the help of AI, no workers involved) Independent of what AI can do today, I suspect this was a reason why so many…

You say it like it's a bad thing.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#102

Post by mckn1ght »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #95
mckn1ght wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is code, yes it can be more or less spaghetti but if it compiles at all, it can be refactored. Having to dig through all that other crap is unfortunate. Ideally you have tests that encapsulate the specs, which are then also code. And help with said refactors.

We had enough tests to know that no other rule configuration worked. Heck, we had mathematical proof (and a small pile of other documentation too obsolete or cryptic to be of use), and still, the only thing that saved the project was noticing different stylistic conventions in different parts of the source, allowing the minor monolith to be broken down into "this is the core logic" and "these are the parts of a separ…

> generative AI systems essentially strip away all the "non-verbal" communication channels

This is a human problem, not a technological one.

You can still have all your aforementioned broken powerpoints etc and use AI to help write code you would’ve previously written simply by hand.

If your processes are broken enough to create unmaintainable software, they will do so regardless of how code pops into existence. AI just speeds it up either way.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#103

Post by palata »

I tend to think about the average code review: who actually catches tricky bugs? Who actually takes the time to fully understand the code they review? And who likes it? My feeling is that reviews are generally a "skimming through the code and checking that it looks ok from a distance".

At least we have one person who understands it in details: the one who wrote it.

But with AI-generated code, it feels like nobody writes it anymore: everybody reviews. Not only we don't like to review, but we don't do it well. And if you want to review it thoroughly, you may as well write it. Many open source maintainers will tell you that many times, it's faster for them to write the code than to review a PR from a stranger they don't trust.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#104

Post by weinzierl »

"But I predict software development will be a lot less fun in the years to come, and that is a very bitter prediction in deed."

Most professional software development hasn't been fun for years, mostly because of all the required ceremony around it. But it doesn't matter, for your hobby projects you can do what you want and it's up to you how much you let AI change that.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#105

Post by mike_hearn »

xg15 wrote: post #77

A question that came up in discussions recently and that I found interesting: How will new APIs, libraries or tooling be introduced in the future? The models all have their specific innate knowledge of the programming ecosystem from the point in time where their last training data was collected. However, unlike humans, they cannot update that knowledge unless a new finetuning is performed - and even then, they can on…

It's not an issue. Claude routinely uses internal APIs and frameworks on one of my projects that aren't public. The context windows are big enough now that it can learn from a mix of summarized docs and surrounding examples and get it nearly right, nearly all the time.

There is an interesting aspect to this whereby there's maybe more incentive to open source stuff now just to get usage examples in the training set. But if context windows keep expanding it may also just not matter.

The trick is to have good docs. If you don't then step one is to work with the model to write some. It can then write its own summaries based on what it found 'surprising' and those can be loaded into the context when needed.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#106

Post by palata »

The calculator made it less important to be relatively good with arithmetic. Many people just cannot add or subtract two numbers without one. And it feels like they lose intuition, somehow: if numbers don't "speak" to you at all, can you ever realize that 17 is roughly a third of 50? The only way you realise it with a calculator is if you actually look for it. Whereas if you can count, it just appears to you.

Similar with GPS and navigation. When you read a map, you learn how to localise yourself based on landmarks you see. You tend to get an understanding of where you are, where you want to go and how to go there. But if you follow the navigation system that tells you "turn right", "continue straight", "turn right", then again you lose intuition. I have seen people following their navigation system around two blocks to finally end up right next to where they started. The navigation system was inefficient, and with some intuition they could have said "oh actually it's right behind us, this navigation is bad".

Back to coding: if you have a deep understanding of your codebases and dependencies, you may end up finding that you could actually extract some part of one codebase into a library and reuse it in another codebase. Or that instead of writing a complex task in your codebase, you could contribute a patch to a dependency and it would make it much simpler (e.g. because the dependency already has this logic internally and you could just expose it instead of rewriting it). But it requires an understanding of those dependencies: do you have access to their code in the first place (either because they are open source or belong to your company)?

Those AIs obviously help writing code. But do they help getting an understanding of the codebase to the point where you build intuition that can be leveraged to improve the project? Not sure.

Is it necessary, though? I don't think so: the tendency is that software becomes more and more profitable by becoming worse and worse. AI may just help writing more profitable worse code, but faster. If we can screw the consumers faster and get more money from them, that's a win, I guess.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#107

Post by nthingtohide »

palata wrote: post #106

The calculator made it less important to be relatively good with arithmetic. Many people just cannot add or subtract two numbers without one. And it feels like they lose intuition , somehow: if numbers don't "speak" to you at all, can you ever realize that 17 is roughly a third of 50? The only way you realise it with a calculator is if you actually look for it. Whereas if you can count, it just appears to you. Simila…

> Back to coding: if you have a deep understanding of your codebases and dependencies, you may end up finding that you could actually extract some part of one codebase into a library and reuse it in another codebase.

I understand the point you are making. But what makes you think refactoring won't be AI's forte. Maybe you could explicitly ask for it. Maybe you could ask it to minify while being human-understandable and that will achieve the refactoring objectives you have in mind.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#108

Post by wobfan »

jwblackwell wrote: post #50
wobfan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he never states this and is not true. The author tell his experience regarding his joy programming things and figuring stuff out. In the end he says that AI made him lose this joy, and he compares it to cheating in a game. He does not say one word about societal impact and or the amount of engineers in the future, it's what you interpreted yourself.

“ In some countries, more than 90% of the population lives on less than $5 per day. If agentic AI code generation becomes the most effective way to write high-quality code, this will create a massive barrier to entry”

> The author is essentially arguing that fewer people will be able to build software in the future.

You comment is talking about ability to build software, vs. the article (in only a single sentence that references this topic, while the other 99% circles around something else) talks about the job market situation. If what you wanted so say "The author is arguing that people will probably have a harder time getting a job in software development", that would have been correct.

> That's the opposite of what's happened over the past year or two. Now many more non-technical people can (and are) building software.

You're (based on the new comment) explicitly saying that people without technical knowledge are getting jobs in software development sector. Where did you get that info from? Would be an interesting read for sure, if it's actually true.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#109

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #81
blackbear_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity at work is well correlated with enjoyment of work, so the industry better look for people who enjoy programming. The realization that productive workers aren't just replaceable cogs in the machine is also a bitter lesson for businessmen.

I think the lifelong dream of many businesspeople is to create the perfect "cog in the machine" or ideally run a business without workers at all. (Tony Stark, Elon Musk's role model, is a good example of that. As far as the movies are concerned, he builds all his most important inventions himself, or with the help of AI, no workers involved) Independent of what AI can do today, I suspect this was a reason why so many…

[deleted]

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#110

Post by siffin »

hedgew wrote: post #12

>Why bother playing when I knew there was an easier way to win? This is the exact same feeling I’m left with after a few days of using Claude Code. I don’t enjoy using the tool as much as I enjoy writing code. My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher l…

Everyone has different objective and subjective experiences, and I suspect some form of selection will promote those who more often feel excited and relieved by using AI than those who feel it more often a negative, like it challenges some core aspect of self.

It might challenge us, and maybe those of us who feel challenged in that way need to rise to it, for there are always harder problems to solve

If this new tool seems to make things so easy it's like "cheating", then make the game harder. Can't cheat reality.

Post reply on HN