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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#361

Post by wesselbindt »

weatherlite wrote: post #308
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…

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.

> as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts

Well there's your reason. OS code is not as in demand or prevalent as crud web app code, so there's less relevant data to train your models on.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#362

Post by gorjusborg »

thechao wrote: post #331
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer

Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen.

So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits production, will require skilled people to figure out how to support it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#363

Post by rossdavidh »

Havoc wrote: post #132

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

You have a point, all people do like to think they're more irreplaceable than they are, but the last round of offshoring of programmers did in fact end up with the companies trying to reverse course a few years later. GM was the most well-known example of this, but I worked at several organizations that found that getting software done on the other side of the planet was a bad idea, and ended up having to reverse course.

The core issue is that the bottleneck step in software development isn't actually the ability to program a specific thing, it's the process of discovering what it is we actually want the program to do. Having your programmers AT THE OFFICE and in close communication with the people who need the software, is the best way to get that done. Having them on the other side of the planet turned out to be the worse way.

This is unintuitive (to programmers as well as the organizations that might employ them), and therefore they have to discover it the hard way. I don't think this is something LLMs will be good at, now or ever. There may come a day when neural networks (or some other ML) will be able to do that, but that day is not near.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#364

Post by swiftcoder »

cma wrote: post #263
swiftcoder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The core Facebook product? Yeah.

Across all products, maybe not - Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, especially since they turned it into a TikTok clone. And WhatsApp is pretty ubiquitous outside of the US (even if it is more used as a free SMS replacement than an actual social network).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#365

Post by layer8 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #307
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 y…

When I see stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994610 (continued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996895), I think the field still has fundamental hurdles to overcome.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#366

Post by jdmoreira »

nexus_six wrote: post #355
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.

This is like saying: "If we just had a stable way to create net energy from a fusion reactor, we'd solve all energy problems". Do we have a way to do that? No.

Yes, we do. It's called reinforcement learning and compute

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#368

Post by shihab »

nerder92 wrote: post #256
badgersnake wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves This is the incorrect assumption, or at least there’s no evidence to support it.

If benchmark means anything in evaluating how model capability progress, the evidence is that all the existing benchmark have been pretty much solved, except FrontierMath ( https://epoch.ai/frontiermath )

I recently saw Sam Altman bragging about OpenAI's performance on Codeforces (leetcode-like website), which I consider just about the worst benchmark possible.

1. All problems are small- the prompt and solution (2. Solving those problems is more about recollecting patterns and less about good new insights. Now, top level human competitors do need original thinking, but that's only because our memory is too small to store all previously seen patterns.

3. Unusually good dataset- you have tens of thousands of problems, each with thousands of submissions, along with clear signals to train on (right/wrong, time taken etc), a very rich discussion sections etc.

I think becoming 100th best Codeforces programmer is still an incredible achievement for a LLM. But for Sam Altman to specifically note the performance on this- I consider that a sign of weakness, not strength.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#370

Post by anavat »

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #324
anavat wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't buy it makes me dumber. It just makes me worse at some things I used to do before, while making better at some other things. Often times it doesn't feel like coding anymore, more like if I were training to be a lawyer or something. But that's my bet.
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