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The Bitter Prediction

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Re: The Bitter Prediction

#161

Post by fragmede »

inerte wrote: post #129
whiplash451 wrote: post #71

The author is doing the math the wrong way. For an extra $5/day, a 3rd world country can now pay an engineer $20/day to do the job of a junior engineer in a 1st world one. The bitter lesson is going to be for junior engineers who see less job offers and don’t see consulting power houses eat their lunch.

Yes, my thoughts at the end of the article. If the AI coding is really good (or will be really, really good) you could give 6 figures salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to a Bay Area developer, OR you give $5/d salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to someone else from another country. That's what happened to manufacturing after all.

Thing is, manufacturing physical goods mean you have to physically move them around. Digital goods don't have that problem. Timezones are what's proving to be challenging though.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#162

Post by gwern »

fragmede wrote: post #156
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.

Well then - the cost of hiring a LLM compared to hiring a human is irrelevant if you are going to deny that hiring in general is irrelevant, now isn't it? So either OP is making an idiotic comparison because he is wrong and using a LLM to do programming already is several orders of magnitude cheaper than using a human to do programming and it is vastly more likely that poor people will be able to afford occasional LLM use, or it's idiotic because it's irrelevant.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#163

Post by fragmede »

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…

> unless a new finetuning is performed

That's where we're at. The LLM needs to be told about the brand new API by feeding it new docs, which just uses up tokens in its context window.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#164

Post by fragmede »

mckn1ght wrote: post #92
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…

There will still be people who care to go deeper and learn what an API is and how to design a good one. They will be able to build the services and clients faster and go deeper using AI code assistants. And then, yes, you’ll have the legions of vibe coders living in Plato’s cave and churning out tinker toys.

That’s it then isn’t it? We are at the level where we’re making tinker toys. What is the tinker toy industry like? Instead of expensive start up Google office. Do I at least get a workshop in the back of the garden? How much does it pay?

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#165

Post by 6510 »

palata wrote: post #121
vertnerd wrote: post #116

I'm a little older now, over 60. I'm writing a spaceflight simulator for fun and (possible) profit. From game assets to coding, it seems like AI could help. But every time I try it out, I just end up feeling drained by the process of guiding it to good outcomes. It's like I have an assistant to work for me, who gets to have all the fun, but needs constant hand holding and guidance. It isn't fun at all, and for me, co…

I can relate to that. Personally, right now I find it difficult to imagine saying "I made this" if I got an AI to generate all the code of a project. If I go to a bookstore, ask for some kind of book ("I want it to be with a hard cover, and talk about X, and be written in language Y, ..."), I don't think that at the end I will feel like I "made the book". I merely chose it, someone else made it (actually it's multipl…

I accidentally questioned out loud if the daughter created the video. I assure you, you've made it! If you bring into existence the proverbial PalataOS in a 6 word prompt we should blame and praise you for it.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#166

Post by aeonik »

skybrian wrote: post #149
aeonik wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software could be much, much cheaper if libraries were easier to use, and data formats and protocols were more open. So much code I have written and worked with is either CRUD or compatibility layers for un/under-documented formats. It's as of most of the industry are plumbers, but we are mining and fabricating the materials for the pipes, and digging trenches to and from every residence using completely different pi…

I think that’s too pessimistic. There are lots of successful standards. We rely on standard API’s and libraries a lot more nowadays than we used to. Some of them are pretty good. There’s been a lot of progress. But it takes a while because the wheel has to be reinvented many times before people give up on improving it. When a new language comes along, a lot of stuff gets reimplemented. There’s plenty of churn, but th…

Hmm, My comment wasn't a prediction, it's just an observation on my personal experience.

I find the opportunity for improvement exciting, and I'm optimistic for the future.

Like, statistically most software I've seen written, didn't need to be done. There were better ways, or it was already solved, and it was a knowledge or experience gap, or often a not invented here syndrome.

The main thing that frustrates me these days, is trying to do things better doesn't generally align with the quarterly mentality.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#167

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

cardanome wrote: post #19

A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai. Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash. It also tracks with my own expe…

> A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai.

I ended up watching maybe 10 minutes of these streams on two separate occasions, and he was writing code manually 90% of the time on both occasions, or yelling at LLM output.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#168

Post by tasuki »

zwnow wrote: post #57
tasuki wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A dystopia in which ill look for a new career. What makes you think that will be necessary?

Because I dont want to work with AI agents? I like my work to be fun, as in "I could bear working 8 hours a day with this." I like thinking about the problems and solutions and how that translates to code. I like implementing it with my own hands. Substitute that with writing prompts and I'll look for a different career thats actually fun.

What makes you think you having a career will be a thing by that point?

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#169

Post by whiplash451 »

fragmede wrote: post #161
inerte wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my thoughts at the end of the article. If the AI coding is really good (or will be really, really good) you could give 6 figures salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to a Bay Area developer, OR you give $5/d salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to someone else from another country. That's what happened to manufacturing after all.

Thing is, manufacturing physical goods mean you have to physically move them around. Digital goods don't have that problem. Timezones are what's proving to be challenging though.

100%. You can offshore "please write code doing X for me" but it's much harder to offshore "please generate value for my customers with this codebase" which is a lot closer to what software engineers actually do.

Therefore, I do not anticipate a massive offshoring of software like what happened in manufacturing. Yet, a lot of software work can be fully specified and will be outsourced.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#170

Post by zwnow »

tasuki wrote: post #168
zwnow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I dont want to work with AI agents? I like my work to be fun, as in "I could bear working 8 hours a day with this." I like thinking about the problems and solutions and how that translates to code. I like implementing it with my own hands. Substitute that with writing prompts and I'll look for a different career thats actually fun.

What makes you think you having a career will be a thing by that point?

Because it already is a thing? Some companies already force AI upon their devs. And weird, I still need to pay my bills so yea, I need a career to do so.
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