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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#221

Post by renegade-otter »

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…

AI will create more jobs, if anything, as the "engineers" out of their depth create massive unmaintainable legacy.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#222

Post by goosejuice »

3s wrote: post #135
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.

For a lot of tasks like frontend development I’ve found that a tool like cursor can get you pretty far without much prior knowledge. IMO (and experience) many tasks that previously required to hiring a programmer or designer with knowledge of the latest frameworks can now be replaced by one motivated “prompt engineer” and some patience

I love cursor, but yeah no way in hell. This is where it chokes the most and I've been leaning on it for non trivial css for a year or more. If I didn't have experience with frontend it would be a shit show. If you replaced a fe/designer with a "prompt engineer" at this stage it would be incredibly irresponsible.

Responsiveness, cohesive design, browser security, accessibility and cross browser compatibility are not easy problems for LLMs right now.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#225

Post by renegade-otter »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #207
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…

> Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at. This is the only current threat. The time you save as a developer using AI on mundane stuff will get filled by something else, possibly more mundane stuff. A small company with only 2-5 Seniors may not be able to drop anyone. A company with 100 seniors might be able to drop 5-10 of them total, spread across…

Especially since the zero-interest bonanza led to over-hiring of resume-driven developers. Half of AWS is torching energy by runnning some bloat that should not even be there.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#226

Post by johnnyjeans »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #149
qoez wrote: post #130

Some companies will try to fire as many programmers as possible and will end up struggling bc they have no moats against other companies with access to the same AI, or will hit some kind of AI saturation usefulness threshold. Other companies will figure out a smart hybrid to utilize existing talent and those are probably the ones that will thrive among the competition.

But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator". I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.

> But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI?

For the same reason you need Engineers to operate CAD software.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#227

Post by falcor84 »

dingnuts wrote: post #187
falcor84 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I don't think that anyone is advocating for LLMs to be used "on their own". Isn't it like saying that airplanes are useless "on their own" in 1910, before people had a chance to figure out proper runways and ATC towers?

there was that post about "vibe coding" here the other day if you want to see what the OP is talking about

You mean Karpathy's post discussed on https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 ?

If so, I quite enjoyed that as a way of considering how LLM-driven exploratory coding has now become feasible. It's not quite there yet, but we're getting closer to a non-technical user being able to create a POC on their own, which would then be a much better point for them in engaging an engineer. And it will only get better from here.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#228

Post by [deleted] »

menaerus wrote: post #216
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company allowed us to use it but most developers around me didn't reach out to the correct people to be able to use it. Yes I find it incredibly helpful and try to tell them. But it's only helpful in small contexts, auto completing things, small snippets, generating small functions. Any large scale changes like most of these AI companies try to push them being capable of doing it just falls straight on its face. I…

Did you have to do any preparation steps before you asked from a model to do the large scale change or there were no steps involved? For example, did you simply ask for the change or did you give a model a chance to learn about the codebase. I am genuinely asking, I'm curious because I haven't had a chance to use those models at work.

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#229

Post by OccamsMirror »

renegade-otter wrote: post #221
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…

AI will create more jobs, if anything, as the "engineers" out of their depth create massive unmaintainable legacy.

It's Access databases all over again.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#230

Post by whynotminot »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
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…

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though?

Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory.

Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design.

I actually sort of agree with the old C hands to some extent. I think people don’t understand how a lot of things actually work. And it also doesn’t really seem to matter 95% of the time.

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