It's already pretty hard to find engineers that can actually go deep on problems. I predict this will get even worst with AI.
Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
371–380 of 886 posts
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#372You can substitute AI with "Some Javascript Framework" and the subtitles still apply very well. Yet nobody was particularly concerned about that.
hehehe yea but how many of us were hand-writing JavaScript for a living anyways :)
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#373Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#374Earlier 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…
I wonder about this too - and also wonder what the difference of order is between the historical shifts you mention and the one we're seeing now (or will see soon). Is it 10 times the "abstracting away complexity and understanding"? 100, 1000, [...]? This seems important. There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the m…
> There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the machine works and thus ability to "dive in and figure things out" when something goes wrong is pretty much completely lost.
For me this happened when working on some Spring Boot codebase thrown together by people who obviously had no idea what they were doing (which maybe is the point of Spring Boot; it seems to encourage slopping a bunch of annotations together in the hope that it will do something useful). I used to be able to fix things when they went wrong, but this thing is just so mysterious and broken in such ridiculous ways that I can never seem to get to the bottom of it,
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#375I have to disagree with this article. Companies as is, particularly larger companies have a lot of fluff. People who do about three or four hours of work a week, and effectively just sit around so senior management can claim they have so many people working on such and such project. With AI, you no longer need those employees to justify your high valuations. You don't need as many juniors. The party is over tell the…
People who look forward to retiring are like people who look forward to heaven: missing out on life due to the belief their “real” life hasn’t begun yet.
I want to spend all day making music, and small games.
I haven't figured out a way to do that in a manner that supports myself.
Every job is ultimately filing out TPS reports. The reports might look a little different, but it's still a TPS report.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll probably never have evidence either way ... Did Google and Stack Overflow "replace" programmers? Yes, in the sense that I suspect that with the strict counterfactual -- taking them AWAY -- you would have to hire 21 people instead of 20, or 25 instead of 20, to do the same job. So strictly speaking, you could fire a bunch of people with the new tools. --- But in the same period, the industry expanded rapidly, an…
Google Coding is definitely a real problem. And I can't believe how wrong some of the answers on Stack Overflow are. But the real problems are managerial. Stonks must go up, and if that means chasing a ridiculous fantasy of replacing your workforce with LLMs then let's do that!!!!111!! It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. Maybe the CEOs have decided they don't n…
> It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers.
If the issue is that the AI can't code, then yes you shouldn't replace the programmers: not because they're good consumers, just because you still need programmers.
But if the AI can replace programmers, then it's strange to argue that programmers should still get employed just so they can get money to consume, even though they're obsolete. You seem to be arguing that jobs should never be eliminated due to technical advances, because that's removing a consumer from the market?
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#377What about.. empowering programmers with AI - can it create any useful things ?
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#378What 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.
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…
> It'll happen gradually over time
How much time? I totally agree with you but being early is the same as being wrong as someone clever once said. There's a huge difference between it happening in less than 5 years like Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are saying and it taking 20 more years. If the second scenario is what happens me and many people on this thread can probably retire rather comfortably, and humanity possibly has enough time to come up with a working system to handle this mass change. If the first scenario happens it's gonna be very very painful for many people.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#379There'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.
People investing their lives in the field are inherently biased. This is not to diminish them, it’s just a fact of the matter. Nobody knows how general intelligence really works, nor even how to reliably test for it, so it’s all speculation.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#380Earlier 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…
I've found it very easy to end up "generating" yourself into a corner with a total mess with no clear control flow that ends up more convoluted than need be, by a mile. If you're in mostly (or totally) unfamiliar territory, you can end up in a mess, fast. I was playing around with writing a dead-simple websocket server in go the other evening and it generated some monstrosity with multiple channels (some unused?) and…
Yeah I've found its good for getting something basic started from scratch, but often times if I try to iterate, it starts hallucinating very fast and forgetting what it was even doing after a short while.
Newer models have gotten better at this and it takes longer before they start making things gibberish but all of them have their limit.
And given the size of lots of enterprise codebases like the ones I'm working in, it just is too far away from being useful enough to replace many programmers in my opinion. I'm convinced the CEO's who are saying AI are replacing programmers are just using it as an excuse to downsize while getting investors happy.