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I'm worried it might get bad

danielmiessler.com

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Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#191

Post by rsanek »

hintymad wrote: post #183

> Tech layoffs by year I was wondering how much was due to over hiring during the crazy 2020-2021. Multiple companies increased their headcount by more than 50%, or even by 100% during the two years. That does not make business or technical sense at all, as tech companies are supposed to scale their services with technology instead of people. Companies add people only if they want to invest in new areas, but exactly…

50% or 100%? Which companies? All the biggest companies increased by some durin 2020~2022, but not really all that much more than their historical growth rates.

What did happen uniformly is that all essentially stopped hiring after 2022.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#192

Post by yubblegum »

Sebb767 wrote: post #157
righthand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does. You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding po…

> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyw…

> what is code, if not text, anyway?

Poetry is text too. It is a misleading categorization.

> I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway?

CI, version control, and IDEs do not think for you.

Resisting using LLMs to do the code that you know perfectly well how to do is like resisting using maps to tell you to make "now make a left turn" to travel from A to B, when you have gone from A to B a zillion fucking times. It is perfectly sensible, specially if you want to retain your skills and mental acuity.

Anecdotally, I know individuals (ok, Dad /g) who can no longer negotiate even the most simple routes without the stupid map thing walking them through all the turns. Routes that were taken for years without these gizmos now require the gizmo.

This is an unfortunate 'experiment' we are conducting in this field. The actual lasting results (or damages) are unknown as of yet. We have some idea though.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#193

Post by more_corn »

znpy wrote: post #171
curiousguy wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue. I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist. If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left…

I wonder if the codebase will be understandable at all. You can most often “get used” to a codebase because they authors tend to stick to the same patterns in many ways, and they are somewhat coherent across time. After a bit you can kinda guess in what file is a feature implemented etc etc. Will this still be true with ai doing most of the work?

Claude is really good about documenting what it has done. I’ve also had some good luck with “I’m interested in this part of the codebase please explain it to me” And “this part is not working let’s diagnose” I’ve been doing a lot of productionization of nontechnical vibecoding. And I provide a lot of feedback on best practices (one of which is to ask “is this best practices for security and data protection?”)

That being said there’s no replacement for a real knowledgeable human software engineer.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#194

Post by more_corn »

xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #102
mholt wrote: post #23

Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinated software. We're on the verge of two revolutions in tech, not one.

The rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.

The good news is there are several thousand newly unemployed software engineers on the market…

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#195

Post by amilios »

quesera wrote: post #148
amilios wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if everyone raises prices simultaneously proportional to the UBI?

In the absence of collusion, if a business can produce a product or service less expensively, giving them the ability to outcompete competitors, they will do so.

Even if UBI is funded by taxation, rather than deficit spending, isn't it possible that demand will increase for some products (e.g. basic necessities that UBI recipients will suddenly be able to spend more on), causing inflationary pressure on the prices of those products?

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#196

Post by ponector »

evklein wrote: post #184
fusslo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? medical devices, and maybe some control software? Oh and probably defense too I don't feel much better ( as someone who has spent their career in consumer electronics )

> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.

But how many people are there? Comparing to 100k in Meta? To millions from Indian body shops?

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#197

Post by JeremyNT »

righthand wrote: post #117
AstroBen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code

I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does. You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding po…

I used to be like you and then I decided to get up to speed on where things stand a couple of months ago.

I hate using it but I can write issues in gitlab, send them to aider, and it will spit out working solutions complete with test coverage.

Right now I think I'm maybe still faster just writing things myself but this feels incredibly tenuous. I'm certain that in a year vibe driven development will be faster.

There is no programmer's union. When the industry decides it's time to get rid of developers because vibe coding is faster than mid level developers, there is no counter.

The only developers left will be either true 100x geniuses or vibe coders. I'm not the former so I am trying to make sure I can become the latter long enough to last a few extra years.

Regardless of how much you personally want to resist, this is what is going to happen.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#198

Post by righthand »

AstroBen wrote: post #134
righthand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does. You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding po…

How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope? Continuing to use a hand saw when there are power tools available seems like the downward slope.. If AI gets to a point where I'm fully able to be removed from auditing/coding positions.. well there won't be any coding positions left for anyone > often don’t know what the Pr actually does this is on them for being…

> How is investing in something that improves my productivity and output quality a downward career slope?

> I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code

You don’t think relying on a system you yourself are predicting will replace you isn’t investing in a downward slope. Wait until you find out Llms are helping suppress your wages.

> this is on them for being lazy.

Just like you gave into Llms you became lazy about writing code. That is the trend with Llms, to do less work as you’ve been pointing out.

You saving time the same thing as being lazy.

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#199

Post by readthenotes1 »

fusslo wrote: post #152
ponector wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions Usually no one really care. Target is to close a ticket, not to make a good software. "Works fine on my machine" - heard this many times. But user don't have a beefy m4 pro machine with ultra fast fiber. No one care.

Yeah but the ‘works fine on my machine’ is usually said by jr/inept devs I havent heard that around serious engineers

Isn't that the no true Scotsman fallacy?

I'm overjoyed that you only encountered serious "engineers".

My professional experience is that at least 3/4 of the people riding software should not be because they write horrible code horribly.

But since I live in a place where you have to pass licensing exams to call yourself an "engineer", Maybe my experience is different than yours

Re: I'm worried it might get bad

#200

Post by righthand »

JeremyNT wrote: post #197
righthand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does. You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding po…

I used to be like you and then I decided to get up to speed on where things stand a couple of months ago. I hate using it but I can write issues in gitlab, send them to aider, and it will spit out working solutions complete with test coverage. Right now I think I'm maybe still faster just writing things myself but this feels incredibly tenuous. I'm certain that in a year vibe driven development will be faster. There…

I didn’t say I don’t invest or use automation or other AI. I said I don’t use Llms. There’s a huge difference.
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