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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#301

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

weatherlite wrote: post #296
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.

Market hype is all it is.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#302

Post by kayge »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #73
pyrale wrote: post #11

We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

What job title are you thinking of using?

Full Prompt Developer

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#303

Post by hombre_fatal »

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…

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way.

But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time.

My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It was Ruby on Rails. I built some popular services without knowing how anything worked. There was always a gem (lib) for it. And Rails especially insulated the workings of anything.

An S3 avatar upload system was `gem install carrierwave` and then `mount_uploader :avatar, AvatarUploader`. It added an avatar control to the User form.

But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long, especially once you've built a few things, and you keep learning new things. And you keep wanting to build different things.

Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else?

It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that. You get better, you learn more, and you become the question-answerer. And one day you sheepishly look at your question history in amazement at how far you've come.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#304

Post by p0w3n3d » 

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
  
  ~ Arthur C. Clarke
People who make decisions got bamboozled by the ads and marketing of AI companies. They failed to detect a lack of intelligence and got deceived, that they have magical golems for a fraction of the price but eventually, they will get caught with their pants down.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#305

Post by scarface_74 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #281
scarface_74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Instagram has been called one of the greatest acquisitions of all time only below the Apple/Next acquisition.

That was 13 years ago. How are things going more recently?

$53 million in 2012 and $62.36 billion in profit last year…

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#306

Post by [deleted] »

kkapelon wrote: post #153
entropyneur wrote: post #26

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

"Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI" https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#307

Post by RivieraKid »

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'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here.

AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this year.

We have a system that is similar to top humans at competitive programming. This wasn't true 1 year ago. Who knows what will happen in 1 year.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#308

Post by weatherlite »

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…

There's no need for tens of millions of OS Kernel devs , most of us are writing business logic CRUD apps.

Also, it's not entirely clear to me why LLMs should get extremely good in web app development but not OS development, as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#309

Post by Finnucane »

falcor84 wrote: post #196
icepat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg, as always, is well known for making excellent business decisions that lead to greater sector buy in. The Metaverse is going great.

Really, that's what you're going with, arguing against the business acumen of the world's second richest person, and the only one at that scale with individual majority control over their company? As for the Metaverse, it was always intended as a very long-term play which is very early to be judged, but as an owner of a Quest headset, it's already going great for me.

The Metaverse is actually still a thing? With, like, people in it and stuff? Who knew?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#310

Post by croes »

nerder92 wrote: post #155

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change…

That the second assumnoption is wrong is based on > intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI

How many companies are intelligent given how many dumb decisions we see?

If we assume enough not so intelligent companies then better AI code we lead to mass firing.

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