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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#291

Post by arrowsmith »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #239
insane_dreamer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done". I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers. 1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe 2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-savin…

I actually know a professional translator and while a year ago he was full of worry, he now is much more relaxed about it. It turns out that like art, many people just want a human doing the translation. There is a strong romantic element to it, and it seems humans just have a strong natural inclination to only want other humans facilitating communication.

How do they know that a human is doing the translation? What's to stop someone from just c&ping the text into an LLM, giving it a quick proofread, then sending it back to the client and saying "I translated this"?

Sounds like easy money, maybe I should get into the translation business.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#292

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

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…

Yea, i agree fully.

real programming of course wont go away. But in the public eye it lost its mysticism as seemingly anyone can code now. Of course that aint true and noone managed to create anything of substance by prompting alone.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#293

Post by nerder92 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #272
nerder92 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, it's an observation considering how AI improvement is related to Moore's law. [1]( https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/nvidia-ceo-says-his-ai-chi... )

But some say that Moore Law is dead :) Anyway, the mumber of tiktok users coorelates with advancements in AI too! Before tiktok the progress was slower, then when tiktok appeared it progressed as hell!

Yes I see your point, correlation is not causation. Again, this is my best guess and observation based on my personal view of the world and my understanding of data on hands at t0 (today). This doesn't spare if from being incorrect or extremely wrong, as always when dealing with predictions of a future outcome.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#295

Post by somenameforme »

nerder92 wrote: post #246
high_na_euv wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. How are you so sure?

I'm not sure, it's an observation considering how AI improvement is related to Moore's law. [1]( https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/nvidia-ceo-says-his-ai-chi... )

That's an assumption. Most/all neural network based tech faces a similar problem of exponentially diminishing returns. You get from 0 to 80 in no time. A bit of effort and you eventually ramp it up to 85, and it really seems the goal is imminent. Yet suddenly each percent, and then each fraction of a percent starts requiring exponentially more work. And then you can even get really fun things like you double your training time and suddenly the resultant software starts scoring worse on your metrics, usually due to overfitting.

And it seems, more or less, clear that the rate of change in the state of the art has already sharply decreased. So it's likely LLMs have already entered into this window.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#296

Post by weatherlite »

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 agree but too many serious people are hinting we are very close I can't ignore it anymore. Sure, when Sam Altman / Zuckerberg say we're close I don't know if I can believe him because obviously the dudes will say anything to sell/pump the stock price. But how about Demis Hassabis ? He doesn't strike me like that at all. Same for Geoff Hinton, Bengio and a couple of others.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#297

Post by aksosnckckd »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #234
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.

I can say my company stopped contracting for test system design, and we use a mix of models now to achieve the same results. Some of these have been running without issue for over a year now.

As in writing test cases? I’ve seen devs write (heavily mocked) unit tests using only AI, but these are worse than no tests for a variety of reasons. Our company also used to contract for these tests…but only because they wanted to make the test coverage metric to up. They didn’t add any value but the contractor was offshore and cheap.

If you’re able to have AI generate integration level tests (ie call an API then ensure database or external system is updated correctly - correctly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) that would be amazing! You’re sitting on a goldmine, and I’d happily pay for these kind of tests.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#298

Post by lolinder »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #285
lolinder wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that many working developers are still in companies that don't allow experimentation with the bleeding edge of AI on their code base, so their experiences come from headlines and from playing around on personal projects. And on the first 10,000 lines of code, the best in class tools are actually pretty good. Since they can help define the structure of the code, it ends up shaped in a way that w…

the kinds of projects that software engineers typically work on for pay This assumes a typical project is fairly big and complex. Maybe I'm biased the other way, but I'd guess 90% of software engineers are writing boilerplate code today that could be greatly assisted by LLM tools. E.g., PHP is still one of the top languages, which means a lot of basic WordPress stuff that LLMs are great at.

The question isn't whether the code is complex algorithmically, the question is whether the code is:

* Too large to fit in the useful context window of the model,

* Filled with bunch of warts and landmines, and

* Connected to external systems that are not self-documenting in the code.

Most stuff that most of us are working on meets all three of these criteria. Even microservices don't help, if anything they make things worse by pulling the necessary context outside of the code altogether.

And note that I'm not saying that the tools aren't useful, I'm saying that they're nowhere near good enough to be threatening to anyone's job.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#299

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

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…

Yea, every progeammer should write at least a cpu emulator in their language of choice, its such a undervalued exercise that will teach you so much about how stuff really works.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#300

Post by SJC_Hacker »

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.

Because programmers know the right questions to ask

AIs have been shown to have confirmation bias depending on what you ask them. They won't question your assumptions on non-obvious subjects. Like "why should this application be written in Python and not C++". You could ask it the opposite, and it will provide ample justification for either position.

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