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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#261

Post by iamleppert »

randmeerkat wrote: post #244
dev1ycan wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians

> he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians Don’t hate on it, just spin up some startup with “ai” and LLM hype. Juice that lemon.

When life gives you delusional VC's that don't understand the basics of what they are investing in, make lemonade! Very, very expensive lemonade!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#262

Post by fuy »

whynotminot wrote: post #230
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And also these old C hands don't seem to get paid (significantly) more than a regular web-dev who doesn't care about hardware, memory, performance etc. Go figure.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#263

Post by cma »

swiftcoder wrote: post #205
SirFatty wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the ~8 years since I worked there, Zuckerberg announced that we'd all be spending our 8 hour workdays in the Metaverse, and when that didn't work out, he pivoted to crypto currency. He's just trend-chasing, like all the other executives who are afraid of being left behind as their flagship product bleeds users...

Have they bled users?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#264

Post by SJC_Hacker »

whynotminot wrote: post #230
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And that last 5% is what you're paying for

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#265

Post by bwfan123 »

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…

A "causal model" is needed to fix bugs ie, to "root-cause" a bug.

LLMs yet dont have the idea of a causal-model of how something works built-in. What they do have is pattern matching from a large index and generation of plausible answers from that index. (aside: the plausible snippets are of questionable licensing lineage as the indexes could contain public code with restrictive licensing)

Causal models require machinery which is symbolic, which is able to generate hypotheses and test and prove statements about a world. LLMs are not yet capable of this and the fundamental architecture of the llm machine is not built for it.

Hence, while they are a great productivity boost as a semantic search engine, and a plausible snippet generator, they are not capable of building (or fixing bugs in) a machine which requires causal modeling.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#266

Post by raducu »

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.

> For example, did you simply ask for the change or did you give a model a chance to learn about the codebase.

I've tried it both with personal projects and work.

My personal project/benchmark is a 3d snake game. O3 is by far the best, but even with a couple of hundred lines of code it wrote itself it loses coherence and can't produce changes that involve changing 2 lines of code in a span of 50 lines of code. It either cannot comprehend it needs to touch multiple places of re-writes huge chunks of code and breaks other functionality.

At work, it's fine for writing unit tests on straight forward tasks that it most likely has seen examples of before. On domain-specific tasks it's not so good and those tasks usually involve multiple file edits in multiple modules.

The denser the logic, the smaller the context where LLMs seem to be coherent. And that's funny, because LLMs seem to deal much better with changing code humans wrote than the code the LLMs wrote themselves.

Which makes me wonder -- if we're all replaced by AI, who will write the frameworks and programming languages themselves?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#267

Post by natch »

demircancelebi wrote: post #43

The post eerily sounds like it is written by the jailbreaked version of Gemini

Yes it is obviously LLM generated. The article is full of tells starting with the opening phrase.

But this went fact right past most commenters here, which is interesting in itself, and somewhat alarming for what it reveals about critical thinking and reading skills.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#268

Post by deadlast2 »

whynotminot wrote: post #230
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The programming is an interface to the machine. The AI even what we know now (LLM's, Agents, RAG) will absorb all that. It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers.

All future programmers will be using it.

For the programmers that don't want to use it. I think there will be literally billions of lines of unbelievably bad code generated by these 1-100 generation Ai's and junior programmers that need to be corrected and fixed.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#269

Post by coolKid721 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #233

My opinion: tech isn't firing programmers for AI. If is firing peogrammers because of the financial environment, and waving around AI as a fig leaf to pretend that it is not really cutting back in output. When the financial environment loosens again, there’ll be a new wave of tech hiring (which is about equally likely to publicly be portrayed as either reversing the AI firing or exploiting new opportunities due to AI…

most narratives for everything are just an excuse for macro stuff. we had zirp for basically the entire period of 2008 - 2022 and when that stopped there was huge lay offs and less hiring. I see lots of newer/younger devs being really pessimistic about the future of the industry, being mindful of the macro factors is important so people don't buy into the AI narratives (which is just to bump up their stocks).

If people can get a safer return buying bonds they aren't going to invest in expansion and hiring. If there is basically no risk free rate of return you throw your money at hiring/new projects because you need to make a return. Lots of that goes into tech jobs.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#270

Post by sumoboy »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #220

I think a more interesting question is what the impact will be on the next generation looking at CS/SWE as a potential profession. It's been considered a pretty "safe" profession for a long time now. That will change over the next 10 years. Will parents advise their kids to avoid CS because the job market will be so much smaller in 10 years' time?

I'm sure that's happening right now. On the flipside will companies who hire in 4 years look at those CS/SWE kids as lessor skilled devs because they relied so much on AI to pass classes and didn't really learn?
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