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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#391

Post by layer8 »

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 )

Given that I’ve seen excellent mathematicians produce poor-quality code in real-world software projects, I’m not sure how relevant these benchmarks are.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#392

Post by sanderjd »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #383
zozbot234 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But any heavy use of "no-code" apps also ends up looking this way, with "straight-up code" behind many of the wysiwyg boxes.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#393

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

menaerus wrote: post #216
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…

Did you have to do any preparation steps before you asked from a model to do the large scale change or there were no steps involved? For example, did you simply ask for the change or did you give a model a chance to learn about the codebase. I am genuinely asking, I'm curious because I haven't had a chance to use those models at work.

There are simply no models that can keep in context the amount of info required in enterprise codebases before starting to forget or hallucinate.

I've tried to give it relevant context myself (a tedious task in itself to be honest) and even tools that claim to automatically be able to do so fail wonderfully at bigger than toy project size in my experience.

The codebase I'm working on day to day at this moment is give or take around 800,000 lines of code and this isn't even close to our largest codebase since its just one client app for our monolith.

Even trivial changes require touching many files. It would honestly take any average programmer less time to implement something themselves than trying to convince an LLM to complete it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#394

Post by AlexCoventry »

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…

> people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering

Perhaps Python will become the new assembly code. :-)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#395

Post by lawlessone »

data-ottawa wrote: post #290
lawlessone wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I think something needs to actually experience the world in 3d in real time to understand what it is actually coding things or doing tasks for.

I don’t know that it needs to experience the world in real-time, but when the brain thinks about things it’s updating its own weights. I don’t think attention is a sufficient replacement for that mechanism. Reasoning LLMs feel like an attempt to stuff the context window with additional thoughts, which does influence the output, but is still a proxy for plasticity and aha-moments that can generate.

>I think this is true only if there is a novel solution that is in a drastically different direction than similar efforts that came before.

That's good point, we don't do that right now. it's all very crystalized.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#396

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

My son is a CS major right now, and since I've been programming my whole adult life, I've been keeping an eye on his curriculum. They do still teach CS majors from the "ground up" - he took system architecture, assembly language and operating systems classes. While I kind of get the sense that most of them memorize enough to pass the tests and get their degree, I have to believe that they end up retaining some of it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#397

Post by jackcosgrove »

fuy wrote: post #262
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 also these old C hands don't seem to get paid (significantly) more than a regular web-dev who doesn't care about hardware, memory, performance etc. Go figure.

Pay is determined by the supply and demand for labor, which encompass many factors beyond the difficulty of the work.

Being a game developer is harder than being an enterprise web services developer. Who gets paid more, especially per hour?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#398

Post by anothermathbozo »

high_na_euv wrote: post #198
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…

>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?

No one has certainty here. It’s an emergent technology and no one knows for certain how far it can be pushed.

It’s reasonable that people explore contingencies where the technology does improve to a point of driving changes in the labor market.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#399

Post by sanderjd »

causal wrote: post #177
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…

Not to mention I haven't really seen AI replace anyone, except perhaps as a scapegoat for execs who were planning on layoffs anyway. That said, I do think there is real risk of letting AI hinder the growth of Junior dev talent.

I think I've seen us be able to do more with fewer people than in the past. But that isn't the limiting factor for our hiring. All else equal, we'd like to just do more, when we can afford to hire the people. There isn't a fixed amount of work to be done. We have lots of ideas for products and services to make if we have the capacity.
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