The Bitter Prediction • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#151

Post by mckn1ght » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #126

mckn1ght wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 j…

The software wasn't unmaintainable. The PowerPoints etc were artefacts of a time when everyone involved understood some implicit context , within which the documentation was clear (not cryptic) and current (not obsolete). The only traces of that context we had, outside the documentation, were minor decisions made while writing the program: "what mindset makes this choice more likely?", "in what directions was this or…

I guess I just categorically disagree that a codebase is impossible to understand without “sufficient” additional context. And I think you ascribe too much order to software written by humans that can exist in quite varied groups wrt ability, experience, style, and care.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#152

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

>I just missed writing code.

Even before AI really took of that was an experience many developers, including me, had. Outsourcing has taken over much of the industry. If you work in the west, there is a good probability that a large part of your work is managing remote teams, often in India or other low cost countries.

What AI could change is either reducing the value of outsourcing or make software development so accessible that managing the outsourcing becomes unnecessary.

Either way, I do believe that Software Developers are here to stay. They won't be writing much code in any case. A software developer in the US costs 100k a year and writing software simply will never again be worth 100k year. There are people and programs who are much cheaper.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#153

Post by gwern » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

> Forty-six percent of the global population lives on less than $5 per day. 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. Access to technology is already a major class and inequality problem. My bitter prediction is that these expensive frontier models will become as indispensable for software development as they are inaccessible to most of the world’s population.

Forty-six percent of the global population has never hired a human programmer either because a good human programmer costs more than $5 a day{{citation needed}}.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#154

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

whiplash451 wrote: post #67

The thing is: the industry does not need people who are good at (or enjoy) programming, it needs people who are good at ( and enjoy) generating value for customers through code. So the OP was in a bad place without Claude anyways (in industry at least). This realization is the true bitter one for many engineers.

Writing software will never again be a skill worth 100k a year.

I am sure Software developers are here to stay, but nobody who just writes software is worth anywhere close to 100k a year. Either AI or outsourcing is making sure of that.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#155

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

blackbear_ wrote: post #80

whiplash451 wrote: post #67

The thing is: the industry does not need people who are good at (or enjoy) programming, it needs people who are good at ( and enjoy) generating value for customers through code. So the OP was in a bad place without Claude anyways (in industry at least). This realization is the true bitter one for many engineers.

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.

>so the industry better look for people who enjoy programming

Why? Both AI and outsourcing provide a much cheaper way to get programming done. Why would you pay someone 100k because he likes doing what an AI or an Indian dev Team can do for much cheaper?

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#156

Post by fragmede » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #153

> Forty-six percent of the global population lives on less than $5 per day. 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. Access to technology is already a major class and inequality problem. My bitter prediction is that these expensive frontier mode…

How much of the global population has hired another person to do something for them directly? If I go to the store and the cashier does the transaction, I haven't hired a human. so more broadly, do most people hire other humans for jobs? that seems like a rich person thing to me in the first place.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#157

Post by Ekaros » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

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…

Makes me think that the actual horrific solution here is that every single prompt and output ever made while developing must be logged and stored. As that might be only documentation that exist for what was made.

Actually really thinking, if I was running company allowing or promoting AI use that would be first priority. Whatever is prompted, must be stored forever.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#158

Post by fragmede » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #119

nthingtohide wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I don't get why you're being downvoted here. I don't know that AI won't be able to do that, just like I don't know that AGI won't be a thing. It just feels like it's harder to have the AI detect your dependencies, maybe browse the web for the sources (?) and offer to make a contribution upstream. Or would you envision downloading all the sources of all the dependencies (transitive included) and telling the AI where t…

With Google announcing that they'll let customers run Gemini in their own datacenters, the privacy issue goes away. I'd love it if there was an AI trained on my work's proprietary code.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#159

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

mckn1ght wrote: post #151

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software wasn't unmaintainable. The PowerPoints etc were artefacts of a time when everyone involved understood some implicit context , within which the documentation was clear (not cryptic) and current (not obsolete). The only traces of that context we had, outside the documentation, were minor decisions made while writing the program: "what mindset makes this choice more likely?", "in what directions was this or…

I guess I just categorically disagree that a codebase is impossible to understand without “sufficient” additional context. And I think you ascribe too much order to software written by humans that can exist in quite varied groups wrt ability, experience, style, and care.

It was easy to understand what the code was instructing the computer to do. It was harder to understand what that meant, why it was happening, and how to change it.

A program to calculate payroll might be easy to understand, but unless you understand enough about finance and tax law, you can't successfully modify it. Same with an audio processing pipeline: you know it's doing something with Fourier transforms, because that's what the variable names say, but try to tweak those numbers and you'll probably destroy the sound quality. Or a pseudo-random number generator: modify that without understanding how it works, and even if your change feels better, you might completely break it. (See https://roadrunnerwmc.github.io/blog/2020/05/08/nsmb-rng.htm..., or https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=NUPpvoFdiUQ if you want a few more clips.)

I've worked with codebases written by people with varying skillsets, and the only occasions where I've been confused by the subtext have been when the code was plagiarised.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#160

Post by fragmede » Sun, Apr 13, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

creata wrote: post #61

exfalso wrote: post #21

I'm more and more confident I must be doing something wrong. I (re)tried using Claude about a month ago and I simply stopped using it after about two weeks because on one hand productivity did not increase(perhaps even decreased), but on the other hand it made me angry because of the time wasted on its mistakes. I was also mostly using it on Rust code, so I'm even more surprised about the article. What am I doing wro…

I'd love to watch a video of someone using these tools well, because I am not getting much out of it. They save some time, sometimes, but they're nowhere near the 5x boost that some people claim.

https://youtu.be/5k2-NOh2tk0

We can quibble about the exact number; 1.2x vs 5x vs 10x, but there's clearly something there.