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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#191

Post by chubot »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #182
chubot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that "replacing engineers" is framed as cutting costs But that doesn't really lead to any market advantage, at least for tech companies. AI will also enable your competitors to cut costs. Who thinks they are going to have a monopoly on AI, which would be required for a durable advantage? --- What you want to do is get more of the rare, best programmers -- that's what shareholders and execs should b…

If this works at all, they'll be telling AIs to start multiple companies and keeping the ones that work best. But if that works, it won't take long for "starting companies" and "being a CEO" to look like comically dated anachronisms. Instead of visual and content slop we'll have a corporate stonk slop. If ASI becomes a thing, it will be able to understand and manipulate the entirety of human culture - including econo…

I would bet money this doesn't work

The future of programming will be increasingly small numbers of highly skilled humans, augmented by AI

(exactly how today we are literally augmented by Google and Stack Overflow -- who can claim they are not?)

The idea of autonomous AIs creating and executing a complete money-making business is a marketing idea for AI companies

---

Because if "you" can do it, why can't everyone else do it? I don't see a competitive advantage there

Humans and AI are good at different things. The human+AI is going to outcompete AI only FOR A LONG time

I will bet that will be past our lifetimes, for sure

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#192

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

lolinder wrote: post #183
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

Part of the problem is that many working developers are still in companies that don't allow experimentation with the bleeding edge of AI on their code base, so their experiences come from headlines and from playing around on personal projects. And on the first 10,000 lines of code, the best in class tools are actually pretty good. Since they can help define the structure of the code, it ends up shaped in a way that w…

Some codebases grown with AI assistance must be getting pretty large now, I think an interesting metric to track would be percent of code that is AI generated over time. Still isn't a perfect proxy for how much work the AI is replacing though, because of course it isn't the case that all lines of code would take the same amount of time to write by hand.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#193

Post by saalweachter »

lnrd wrote: post #93
netcan wrote: post #67

Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy. Take banking for example. ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking." Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer. Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades. It's actually shocking how little network enab…

Is there data about this or is just your perception? Because my perception would be different, for example in my country countless bank branches closed and a lot of banking jobs do not exist anymore thanks to widespread home-banking usage (which I also know differs from country to country). This is also from the tales of people that had careers in banking and now tell how less banking jobs there are compared to when…

Googling around, it looks like in the US the number of tellers has declined by 28% over the last 10 years, and is forecast to decline another 15% over the next 10. Earlier data was not easy enough to find in the time I'm willing to spend.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#194

Post by swiftcoder »

Every generation sees a new technology that old timers loudly worry "will destroy programming as a profession".

I'm old enough to remember when that new and destructive technology was Java, and the greybeards were all heavily invested in inline assembly as an essential skill of the serious programmer.

The exact same 3 steps in the article happened about a decade ago during the "javascript bootcamp" craze, and while the web stack does grow ever more deeply abstracted, things do seem to keep on trucking along...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#196

Post by falcor84 »

icepat wrote: post #142
SirFatty wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg said it. https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuckerberg-plans-to-repla...

Zuckerberg, as always, is well known for making excellent business decisions that lead to greater sector buy in. The Metaverse is going great.

Really, that's what you're going with, arguing against the business acumen of the world's second richest person, and the only one at that scale with individual majority control over their company?

As for the Metaverse, it was always intended as a very long-term play which is very early to be judged, but as an owner of a Quest headset, it's already going great for me.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#197

Post by burkaman »

SirFatty wrote: post #136
jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

Zuckerberg said it. https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuckerberg-plans-to-repla...

Obviously the people developing AI and spending all of their money on it (https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-invest-up-65-bln-cap...) are going to say this. It's not a useful signal unless people with no direct stake in AI are making this change (and not just "planning" it). The only such person I've seen is the Gumroad CEO (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962345), and that was a pretty questionable claim from a tiny company with no full-time employees.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#198

Post by high_na_euv »

nerder92 wrote: post #155

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change…

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves.

How are you so sure?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#199

Post by daveguy »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #182
chubot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that "replacing engineers" is framed as cutting costs But that doesn't really lead to any market advantage, at least for tech companies. AI will also enable your competitors to cut costs. Who thinks they are going to have a monopoly on AI, which would be required for a durable advantage? --- What you want to do is get more of the rare, best programmers -- that's what shareholders and execs should b…

If this works at all, they'll be telling AIs to start multiple companies and keeping the ones that work best. But if that works, it won't take long for "starting companies" and "being a CEO" to look like comically dated anachronisms. Instead of visual and content slop we'll have a corporate stonk slop. If ASI becomes a thing, it will be able to understand and manipulate the entirety of human culture - including econo…

Fortunately we are nowhere near ASI.

I don't think we are even close to AGI.

That does bring up a fascinating "benchmark" potential -- start a company on AI advice, with sustained profit as the score. I would love to see a bunch of people trying to start AI generated company ideas. At this point, the resulting companies would be so sloppy they will all score negative. And it would still completely depend on the person interpreting the AI.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#200

Post by cratermoon »

lawlessone wrote: post #165
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

Same, LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I think something needs to actually experience the world in 3d in real time to understand what it is actually coding things or doing tasks for.

> actually experience the world in 3d in real time

AKA embodiment. Hubert L. Dreyfus discussed this extensively in "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian": http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515080701239510

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