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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#401

Post by scoutt »

What I see when producing code with AI (C/C++, Qt) is that often it gives output for different versions of a given library. It's like it can't understand (or doesn't know) that a given function is now obsolete and needs to use another method. Sometimes it can be corrected.

I think there will be a point in which humans will no longer be motivated to produce enough material for the AI to update. Like, why would I write/shot a tutorial or ask/answer a question in a forum if people are now going directly to ask to some AI?

And since AI is being fed with human knowledge at the moment, I think the quantity of good material out there (that was used so far for training) is going to slow down. So the AI will need to wait for some repos to be populated/updated to understand the changes. Or it will have to read the new documentation (if any), or understand the changes from code (if any).

All this if it wasn't the AI to introduce the changes itself.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#402

Post by sanderjd »

jvanderbot wrote: post #241
chubot wrote: post #140

Earlier 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…

This is an insightful comment. It smells of Jevron's paradox, right? More productivity leads to increased demand. I just don't remember anyone saying that SO would replace programmers, because you could just copy-paste code from a website and run it. Yet here we are: GPTs will replace programmers, because you can just copy-paste code from a website and run it.

People definitely said this about SO!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#403

Post by whamlastxmas »

lolinder wrote: post #352
menaerus wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think my comment read as snarky but I was surprised to see the immediate downvote which presumably came from you so I only added the last sentence. This is a stupid way of disagreeing and attempting to shut down the discussion without merits. > It doesn't work. Even the models that claim to have really large context windows get very distracted if you don't selectively pick relevant context. I thought Devon is…

> I don't think my comment read as snarky but I was surprised to see the immediate downvote which presumably came from you so I only added the last sentence. I can't downvote you because you are downthread of me. HN shadow-disables downvotes on all child and grandchild comments. I'm the one who upvoted you to counteract the downvote. :)

And then they hugged and became lifelong friends :)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#404

Post by ssimpson »

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…

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live better and work less, but our overlords won't let that happen. Same output with less work by the individual isn't as good as same or more output with the same or less people.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#405

Post by x86hacker1010 »

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…

You think this like newcomers can’t use the LLM to more deeply understand these topics in addition to glue. This mindset is a fallacy as newcomers are more adept and passionate as any other generation. They have better tools and can compete just the same.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#406

Post by iainctduncan »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What 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.

I can tell you from personal experience that investors are feeling pressure to magically reduce head count with AI to keep up with the joneses. It's pretty horrifying how little understanding or information some of the folks making these decisions have. (I work in tech diligence on software M&A and talk to investment committees as part of the job)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#407

Post by tharne »

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…

> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.

Found the guy who's never worked for a large publicly-traded company :) Do you know what's out of touch with reality? Thinking that $BIG_CORP execs who are compensated based on the last three months of stock performance will do anything other than take shortcuts and cut corners given the chance.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#408

Post by gip »

I think that some engineers will still be needed to maintain old codebases for a while yes.

But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends.

So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up.

It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#409

Post by jjallen »

I'll just say that AI for coding has been amazingly helpful for finding bugs and thinking things through and improving things like long functions and simplifying code.

But it can absolutely not replace entire programmers at this point, and it's a long way of being able to say create, tweak, build and deploy entire apps.

That said this could totally change in the next handful of years, and I think if someone worked just on creating a purely JS/React website at this point you could build something that does this. Or at least I think that I could build this. Where the user sort of talks to the AI and describes changes and they eventually get done. Or if not we are approaching that point.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#410

Post by Capricorn2481 »

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…

> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long

That's the difference. This is how you feel because you like programming to some extent. Having worked closely with them, I can tell you there are many people going into bootcamps that flat out dislike programming and just heard it pays well. Some of them get jobs, but they don't want to learn anything. They just want to do as much that doesn't get them fired. They are not curious even with tasks they are supposed to do.

I don't think this is inherently wrong, as I don't feel like gatekeeping the profession if their bosses feel they add value. But this is a classic case of losing the junior > expert pipeline. We could easily find ourselves in a spot in 30 years where AI coding is rampant but there's no experts to actually know what it does.

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