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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#321

Post by weatherlite »

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #292
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…

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.

How do we define real programming? I'm working on python and JS codebases in my startup. So very high level stuff. However to reason well about everything that goes on in our code is no small feat for an LLM (or a human), if its able to take our requirements , understand the business logic and just start refactoring and creating new features on a codebase that is quite big, well yeah, that sounds like AGI to me. In that case I don't see why it won't be able to hack on kernels.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#322

Post by ryandrake »

ActionHank wrote: post #143
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.

There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.

What's the far future end-state that these shareholders and execs envision? Companies with no staff? Just self-maintaining robots in the factory and AI doing the office jobs and paperwork? And a single CEO sitting in a chair prompting them all? Is that what shareholders see as the future of business? Who has money to buy the company's products? Other CEOs?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#323

Post by jnet »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #304

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.

I find the people who promote AI the most are those with vested financial interests in AI. Don't get me wrong, I find it is a useful tool but it's not going to replace programmers any time soon.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#324

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

anavat wrote: post #286
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…

My take is that AI's ability to generate new code will prove so valuable, it will not matter if it is bad at changing existing code. And that the engineers of the distant future (like, two years from now) will not bother to read the generated code, as long as it runs and passes the tests (which will also be AI-generated). I try to use AI daily, and every month I see how it is able to generate larger and more complex…

> I try to use AI daily

You should reflect on the consequences of relying too much on it.

See https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#325

Post by SJC_Hacker »

jdmoreira wrote: post #141

If there will be actual AGI (or super intelligence), none of these arguments hold. The machines will just be better than any programmer money can buy. Of course at that point every knowledge worker is probably unemployable anyway.

True AGI would make every worker unemployable.

The only reason why true androids aren't possible yet is software. The mechanics have been pretty much a solved problem.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#326

Post by rpcope1 »

batuhandumani wrote: post #28

Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…

AI generated slop like your comment here should be a ban-worthy offense. Either you've fed the it through an LLM or you've managed to perfect the art of using flowery language to say little with a lot of big words.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#327

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…

BTW your reasoning for 1 sound like previous reasoning for FSD.

Assuming the same kind of growth in capabilities isn't backed by reality.

The last release of OpenAI's model wasn't dramatically better.

At the moment it's more about getting cheaper.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#328

Post by whynotminot »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #264
whynotminot wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But not really. Looking around my shop, I’m probably the only one around who used to write a lot of C code. No one is coming to ask me about obscure memory bugs. I’m certainly not getting paid better than my peers.

The knowledge I have is personally gratifying to me because I like having a deeper understanding of things. But I have to tell you I thought knowing more would give me a deeper advantage than it has in actual practice.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#330

Post by eitally »

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 agree. It's the current generation's version of what happened with the advent of Javascript frameworks about 15 years ago, when suddenly web devs stopped learning how computers actually work. There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing, can debug complex code bases, and can make appropriate decisions about how to apply technology to business problems.

That said, AI agents are absolutely going to put a bunch of lower end devs out of work in the near term. I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years....

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