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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#231

Post by m3047 »

petesoper wrote: post #228
xnx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

90 years ago there were about seven million farmers in the US. There are now less than two million.

Is that farm hands, or farm operators? What about corps, how do you calibrate that? Is a corp a "person" or does it count for more? My point is that maybe the definition of "farmer" is being pushed to far, as is the notion of "developer". "Prompt engineer"? Are you kidding me about that? Prompts being about as usefully copyrighted / patentable as a white paper. Do you count them as "engineers" because they say so?

I get your point, hope you get mine: we have less legal entities operating as "farms". If vibe coding makes you a "developer", working on a farm in an operating capacity makes you a "farmer". You might profess to be a biologist / agronomist, I'm sure some owners are, but doesn't matter to me whether you're the owner or not.

The numbers of nonsupervisory operators in farming activities have decreased using the traditional definitions.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#232

Post by aranelsurion »

chis wrote: post #104
dijit wrote: post #53

I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…

If Kubernetes didn't in any way reduce labor, then the 95% of large corporations that adopted it must all be idiots? I find that kinda hard to believe. It seems more likely that Kubernetes has been adopted alongside increased scale, such that sysadmin jobs have just moved up to new levels of complexity. It seems like in the early 2000s every tiny company needed a sysadmin, to manage the physical hardware, manage the…

People really look through rose-colored glasses when they talk about late 90s, early 2000s or whenever is their "back then" when they talk about everything being simpler.

Everything was for sure simpler, but also the requirements and expectations were much, much lower. Tech and complexity moved forward with goal posts also moving forward.

Just one example on reliability, I remember popular websites with many thousands if not millions of users would put an "under maintenance" page whenever a major upgrade comes through and sometimes close shop for hours. If the said maintenance goes bad, come tomorrow because they aren't coming up.

Proper HA, backups, monitoring were luxuries for many, and the kind of self-healing, dynamically autoscaled, "cattle not pet" infrastructure that is now trivialized by Kubernetes were sci-fi for most. Today people consider all of this and a lot more as table stakes.

It's easy to shit on cloud and kubernetes and yearn for the simpler Linux-on-a-box days, yet unless expectations somehow revert back 20-30 years, that isn't coming back.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#233

Post by rudedogg »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #30
rvz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who fixes the unmaintainable mess that the AI created in which the vibe coder prompted? The Vibe Coder? The AI? Take a guess who fixes it.

The real question is, do you even need to fix it? Does it matter? The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because a person needs to be able to read and understand the code. If you're vibe coding, that's no longer true. So maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the things we used to consider maintenance headaches are irrelevant.

If these things can ever actually think and understand a codebase this mindset makes sense, but as of now it's a short-sighted way to work. The quality of the output is usually not great, and in some cases terrible. If you're just blindly accepting code with no review, eventually things are going to implode, and the AI is more limited than you are in understanding why. It's not going to save you in it's current form.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#234

Post by BurningFrog »

felipeerias wrote: post #197
zby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? I’m not sure that it does. Historically, it would seem that often lowering the amount of people needed to produce a good is precisely what makes it cheaper. So it’s not hard to imagine a world where AI tools make expert software developers significantly more productive while enabling other workers to use t…

> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing?

Not automatically, no.

How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this.

For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheaper, and millions of smart people become available for other work.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#235

Post by WalterBright »

enos_feedler wrote: post #85
zby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological…

My experiments with AI generated code is you have to specify it like a programmer would, i.e. you have to be a programmer.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#236

Post by AstroBen »

azan_ wrote: post #187
eks391 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers. > AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and…

> evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve I think you are basing your reasoning on the current generation of models. But if future generation will be able to do everything you've listed above, what work will be there left for developers? I'm not saying that we will ever get such…

And your entire argument is based around the possibility of it turning into a magic genie that can do anything

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#237

Post by satvikpendem »

psychoslave wrote: post #23
CodingJeebus wrote: post #16

> Which brings us to the question: why does this pattern repeat? The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. AI has been pushed as an omnipotent, all-powerful job-killer by these companies because shareholder value depends on enough people believing in it, not whether the tooling is actually capable. It's telling that folks like Jensen Huang talk about people's negativity towards AI being one of the bigge…

>The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. Market is not universal gravity, it's just a storefront for social policy. No political order, no market, no market incentives.

Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#238

Post by jasonjmcghee »

austhrow743 wrote: post #221
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies aren't selling anything special or are just selling an "idea". Like liquid death sells water for a strangely high amount of money - entirely sales / marketing. International Star Registry gives you a piece of paper and a row in a database that says you own a star. Many luxury things are just because it's sold by that luxury brand. They are "worth" that amount of money for the status of other people kno…

By this logic you should just be able to list anything for an above average price and have people buy it as a status symbol.

If you can build a luxury brand, sure.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#239

Post by austhrow743 »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #238
austhrow743 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic you should just be able to list anything for an above average price and have people buy it as a status symbol.

If you can build a luxury brand, sure.

Which is very hard. Contradicting this:

> Many companies aren't selling anything special or are just selling an "idea".

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#240

Post by zeroonetwothree »

azan_ wrote: post #187
eks391 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers. > AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and…

> evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve I think you are basing your reasoning on the current generation of models. But if future generation will be able to do everything you've listed above, what work will be there left for developers? I'm not saying that we will ever get such…

Yes, if we assume that AI can do the job of developers then tautologically it can do the job of developers.
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