Firing programmers for AI is a mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#41

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

outime wrote: post #4

Has there been any company so far that has fired 100% of their programmers to replace them with AI?

Has there been any company that has laid off even a nontrivial amount of programmers and replaced them with AI? Here I mean, where developers at said company actually say the process works and is established, and the staff cuts weren't happening anyway.

I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#42

Post by yodsanklai » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

bloomingkales wrote: post #29

I'm sure there is a formal proof someone can flesh out. - Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts. - Deployed at scale for profit - Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example) - Bad things happen for users. I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of…

Why half-assed developer?

It could be high-level developer that take advantage of AI to be more productive. This will reduce team sizes.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#43

Post by demircancelebi » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

The post eerily sounds like it is written by the jailbreaked version of Gemini

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#44

Post by Zealotux » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

entropyneur wrote: post #26

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

I would say "soft replacement" is a thing. People may not be getting fired directly, but companies are hiring fewer developers, and freelancers are most likely getting fewer opportunities than before.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#45

Post by re-thc » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #11

We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

> it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected

The AI complained that the message did not originate from a programmer and decided not to respond.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#46

Post by BossingAround » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…

What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#47

Post by pydry » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

The thing that is going to lead to programmers being laid off and fired all over has and will continue to be market consolidation in the tech industry. The auto industry did the same thing in the 1950s which destroyed detroit.

Market consolidation allows big tech to remain competitive even after the quality of software has been turned into shit by offshoring and multiple rounds of wage compression/layoffs. Eventually all software will end up like JIRA or SAP but you won't have much choice but to deal with it because the competition will be stifled.

AI is actually probably having a very positive effect on hiring that is offsetting this effect. The reason they love using it as a scapegoat is that you can't fight the inevitable march of technological progress whereas you absolutely CAN break up big tech.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#48

Post by nickip » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

My pessimistic take on it is in the future code will closer to AI where its just a blackbox where inputs go in and outputs come out. There will be no architecture, clean code, design principles. You will just have a product manager who bangs on a LLM till the ball of wax conforms to what they want at that time. As long as it meets their current KPI security be dammed. If they can get X done with as little effort as possible and data leaks so be it. They will get a fine (maybe?) and move on.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#49

Post by kklisura » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

ponector wrote: post #10

>>companies aren’t investing in junior developers It was a case before AI as well. Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online

"it is still online" is pretty high bar. The systems is riddled with bugs that are not being addressed for months now and the amount of spam and bots is even larger than before.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#50

Post by jakeogh » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #11

We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

Local minimum.