'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI • Hacker News Board

Re: 'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI

#21

Post by joshstrange » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #19

joshstrange wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah... My company is making these tools mandatory and I suspect they are collecting metrics to see who is using them and how much I'm sorry to hear this. I have encouraged the developers I manage to try out the tools but we're no where close to "forcing" anyone to use them. It hasn't come up yet but I'll be pushing back hard on any code that is clearly LLM-generated, especially if the developer who "wrote" it can'…

> it turns you into a code reviewer Yes. Not only is this the least enjoyable part of the job in general for me, I think it is a task that a lot of devs, even pretty diligent ones, wind up half assing I personally don't mind reviewing coworkers code because I think it is an opportunity to mentor and learn, but that is not really the case with LLM generated code. That code review becomes purely "Does this do what I wa…

I completely agree, I’m not anti-code review but it’s by far the least enjoyable part of my job. It’s never going to give you same understanding that getting into the code will.

That’s acceptable when there is another human who _does_ understand the code (they wrote it) and someone who can learn and grow via the code review process.

None of that applies for LLM-generate code.

In many cases if it fails at the task, it’s much easier for me to just do it myself than to go a couple more rounds with the LLM (cause it’s almost never as easy as a normally code review, you have to prompt better and be more explicit).

That my biggest annoyance with Claude Code/Aider, always feeling like I’m 1 prompt away from everything slotting into place. When, in reality, each time I get back on the merry-go-round it might fix 1 thing and then break another. Or it’s “fix” might be absurd (“I’ll just cast this so it’s the right type” :facepalm:).

Re: 'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI

#22

Post by adrian_b » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

hulitu wrote: post #7

roboboffin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think workplaces will have to allow people time to adapt. So that if your particular skill set is replaced by AI, you have the ability to retrain to a part that isn’t. Ultimately, large part of many jobs are repetitive, and can be replaced by pattern matching. The other side, creating new patterns, is hard and takes time. So, employers will have to take this into account. They may be long periods of “unproductive”…

> So that if your particular skill set is replaced by AI Is AI capable of any skill ? I mean, Microsoft or Google SW looks like it is written by AI but this is since 20 years

My opinion is that the so called "AI", when applied to programming, is just a clever trick for avoiding the copyright laws.

Despite the fact that a half of century ago there was a lot of talk about "software reuse", that has never happened at the expected scale, but not for technical reasons. It has never happened because the copyright laws have prevented it.

During the early years of electronic computers, there were computer user groups where the programs of general interest were shared rather freely between different companies, in order to avoid the duplication of programming work. This has changed sharply after the appearance of software as a product that can be sold and bought, separately from computer hardware.

Even when there exists an open-source solution it frequently cannot be incorporated in the program you are writing for a company, due to incompatible copyrights. Therefore much of the programming work consists in rewriting with minor variations programs that have been already written countless times before, but at another company or by some individual.

The "AI" that "writes" a program for you just makes a search instead of you for one of the existing solutions, with the additional advantage that it has searched code bases that you would have been forbidden to search, and it produces a program source that has been detached from its original copyright, allowing it to be inserted in a proprietary program of your company.

A program "written" by an AI will have the highest quality when it almost matches some program that has been present in the training set. Whenever the generated program is more distant from a verbatim reproduction, being a combination of several programs or having some random changes, there is a high probability that the AI has introduced some errors, which must be corrected by a competent programmer in order to get a valid programming solution.

A human could have done exactly the same thing as the "AI", replacing most of the programming with searching then doing copy and paste, with a similar increase in productivity, but this would have been punishable by the existing laws, while when the AI does it, this is legal.

If software reuse would have been possible without copyright restrictions, then indeed less programming jobs would have been needed. So with the "AI" workaround against the laws, it is really expected to see a job number reduction in this domain.

Re: 'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI

#23

Post by shishy » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

roboboffin wrote: post #3

ramon156 wrote: post #2

I'm sure some people can be replaced by AI. I'm also sure a lot of these stories are just marketing for their crappy GPT wrapper

I think workplaces will have to allow people time to adapt. So that if your particular skill set is replaced by AI, you have the ability to retrain to a part that isn’t. Ultimately, large part of many jobs are repetitive, and can be replaced by pattern matching. The other side, creating new patterns, is hard and takes time. So, employers will have to take this into account. They may be long periods of “unproductive”…

I agree with you but there's something ironic about seeing that comment here, especially considering how many jobs tech has replaced in the last few decades without people having the time to retrain.

Re: 'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI

#24

Post by bluefirebrand » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #20

bluefirebrand wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For myself, I'm fine with Github Copilot auto-completions (up to ~10 lines max) and I review every line it wrote This is what I would like to use it for, but I have been struggling quite a bit with it If I have a rough idea of what a 10-line function might look like and Cursor does the Autocomplete suggestion, it is nice when it is basically what I had in mind and I can just accept the suggestion. This happens very…

> Yeah... My company is making these tools mandatory and I suspect they are collecting metrics to see who is using them and how much This I just don't get. If the tool is actually useful and makes you more productive, then developers will be banging down management's door to let them use it, not the other way around. If the company has to resort to forcing their employees to use a tool, what does that say about the t…

I don't think the tool's effectiveness matters at all honestly, which is a big part of the problem

What matters is they can report some number of AI usage to shareholders who are convinced this is the future no matter what

Re: 'It is a better programmer than me': The reality of being laid off due to AI

#25

Post by BrouteMinou » Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

Hey chatgtp, make an article from the following story, at least 500 words: >> "Someone said that a guy said his cousin talked to an AI." said the person we interviewed on the phone.

He added, "AI is good".

Be afraid, Doom and Gloom. Thank you,

-- a reporter still having a job apparently.