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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#381

Post by lolinder »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
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…

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…

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

I feel like it's a bit different this time because LLMs aren't just an abstraction.

To make an analogy: Ruby on Rails serves a similar role as highways—it's a quick path to get where you're going, but once you learn the major highways in a metro area you can very easily break out and explore and learn the surface streets.

LLMs are a GPS, not a highway. They tell you what to do and where to go, and if you follow them blindly you will not learn the layout of the city, you'll just learn how to use the GPS. I find myself unable to navigate a city by myself until I consciously force myself off of Google Maps, and I don't find that having used GPS directions gives me a leg up in understanding the city—I'm starting from scratch no matter how many GPS-assisted trips I've taken.

I think the analogy helps both in that the weaknesses in LLM coding are similar and also that it's not the end of the world. I don't need to know how to navigate most cities by memory, so most of the time Google Maps is exactly what I need. But I need to recognize that leaning on it too much for cities that I really do benefit from knowing by heart is a problem, and intentionally force myself to do it the old-fashioned way in those cases.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#382

Post by anothermathbozo »

dev1ycan wrote: post #231
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?

he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians

It’s an emergent technology and no one knows for certain how far it can be pushed, not even mathematicians.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#383

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

zozbot234 wrote: post #357
neom wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly. My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engi…

Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.

Excel is hardly "no-code". Any heavy use of Excel I've seen uses formulas, which are straight-up code.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#384

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

ragle wrote: post #288
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #206

Earlier 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…

In a similar situation at my workplace. What models are you using that you feel comfortable trusting it to understand and operate on 10-20k LOC? Using the latest and greatest from OpenAI, I've seen output become unreliable with as little as ~300 LOC on a pretty simple personal project. It will drop features as new ones are added, make obvious mistakes, refuse to follow instructions no matter how many different ways I…

I usually use Claude 3.5 sonnett since its still the one I've had my best luck with for coding tasks.

When it comes to 10k LOC codebases, I still don't really trust it with anything. My best luck has been small personal projects where I can sort of trust it to make larger scale changes, but larger scale at a small level in the first place.

I've found it best for generating tests, autocompletion, especially if you give context via function names and parameter names I find it can oftentimes complete a whole function I was about to write using the interfaces available to it in files I've visited recently.

But besides that I don't really use it for much outside of starting from scratch on a new feature or getting helping me with getting a plan together before starting working on something I may be unfamiliar with.

We have access to all models available through copilot including o3 and o1, and access to chatgpt enterprise, and I do find using it via the chat interface nice just for architecting and planning. But I usually do the actual coding with help from autocompletion since it honestly takes longer to try to wrangle it into doing the correct thing than doing it myself with a little bit of its help.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#385

Post by Capricorn2481 »

baq wrote: post #39
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…

Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.

> You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot

Yuck. I've had enough of "infinite scaling" myself. Consider that scaling shitty service is actually going to get you less customers. Cable monopolies can get away with it, the SaaS working on "A dating app for dogs" cannot.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#386

Post by clbrmbr »

> the real winners in all this: the programmers who saw the chaos coming and refused to play along. The ones who […] went deep into systems programming, AI interpretability, or high-performance computing. These are the people who actually understand technology at a level no AI can replicate.

Is there room for Interpretability outside of major ai labs?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#387

Post by renewiltord »

999900000999 wrote: post #375
pockmarked19 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amusingly, I spent years making multiples of your target comp and now I’m home sitting around using AI to make myself toy games.

The barrier has dropped so low that I think I’d have been more productive if I were still working.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#388

Post by sanderjd »

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…

Notably, I don't think there was a mass disemployment of "old C hands". They just work on different things.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#389

Post by tomrod »

When an organization actively swaps out labor for capital, expecting deep savings and dramatic ROI, instead of incrementally improving processes, they deserve the failure coming. Change management and modernization are actually meaningful, despite the derision immature organizations show towards the processes.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#390

Post by weatherlite »

pockmarked19 wrote: post #351
999900000999 wrote: post #335

I 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 think we look forward to financial independence more so than the retirement itself. Could be nice not having to worry some Chatbot or younger dude are going to replace me and I'll have to go work in McDonalds (not that there's anything wrong with that).
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