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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#441

Post by msaspence »

gip wrote: post #408

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 disappe…

What makes you think that AI is going to produce leaner codebases? They are trained on human codebases. They are going to end up emulating that human code. It's not hard to imagine some improvement here, but my gut is there just isn't enough good code out there to train a significant shift on this.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#442

Post by jayd16 »

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…

These two predictions seem contradictory. If the AI massively improves why would they slow roll adoption?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#443

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

supergarfield wrote: post #376
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The natural conclusion I see is dropping the delusion that every human must work to live. If automation progresses to a point that machines and AI can do 99% of useful work, there's an argument to be made for letting humanity finally stop toiling, and letting the perhaps 10% of people who really want to do the work do the work.

The idea that "everybody must work" keeps harmful industries alive in the name of jobs. It keeps bullshit jobs alive in the name of jobs. It is a drain on progress, efficiency, and the economy as a whole. There are a ton of jobs that we'd be better off just paying everybody in them the same amount of money to simply not do them.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#444

Post by belter »

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…

> Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.

I would not trust them until they can do the news properly. Just read the source Luke.

"AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#445

Post by inetknght »

iainctduncan wrote: post #343

I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly go…

> I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question

Nice. How do I get into that kind of position?

> Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info.

If nobody hears about it, then how do you hear about it? Moreover, what makes you think it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you? And further, if it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you, then don't you think the business lied? And didn't you just say they're not allowed to lie?

Can you clear that up?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#446

Post by giancarlostoro »

AI bros are like crypto bros. Really trying to hype it up beyond what its currently capable of and what it will be capable of in the near future.

I have all sorts of people telling me I need to learn AI or I will lose my job and get left in the dust. AI is still a tool, not a worker.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#447

Post by Capricorn2481 »

jdmoreira wrote: post #366
nexus_six wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying: "If we just had a stable way to create net energy from a fusion reactor, we'd solve all energy problems". Do we have a way to do that? No.

Yes, we do. It's called reinforcement learning and compute

You got some compute hidden in your couch? There's plenty of reason to think there's not enough compute to achieve this, and there's little reason to think compute improves intelligence linearly.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#448

Post by jdmoreira »

varsketiz wrote: post #417
kaneryu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then we ask AGI how to make itself less expensive to run

The answer to that question is 42. Why do you assume AGI is smarter than some human?

Why would humans be peak intelligence? There is even variation for intelligence within the species. We are probably just stuck on some local maxima that satisfies all the constraints of our environment. Current AI is already much smarter than many humans at many things.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#449

Post by weatherlite »

skydhash wrote: post #438
weatherlite wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we define real programming? I'm working on python and JS codebases in my startup. So very high level stuff. However to reason well about everything that goes on in our code is no small feat for an LLM (or a human), if its able to take our requirements , understand the business logic and just start refactoring and creating new features on a codebase that is quite big, well yeah, that sounds like AGI to me. In t…

The fact that you don't see why is the issue. Both python and JS are very permissive and their runtime env is very good. More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs and malformed domain data. A kernel codebase like Linux is one where there are many motivated individual trying every trick to get the computer to do something. And you're usually dealing with leaner abstractions because general safety logic…

> More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs

Definitely. More often than not you're dealing with logic bugs. So the thing solving them will sometimes have to be able to reason quite well across large code bases (not every bug of course, but quite often) to the point I don't really see how it's different than general intelligence if it can do that well. And if it gets to the point its AGIish , I don't see why it can't do Kernel work (or in the very least - reduce the amount of jobs dramatically in that space as well). Perhaps you can automate 50% of the job where we're not really thinking at all as programmers, but the other 50% (or less, or more, debatable) involves planning, reasoning, debugging, thinking. Even if all you do is python and js.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#450

Post by glouwbug »

Pooge wrote: post #219

As a software engineer with about 4 years of experience, what can I do to avoid being left behind? The author mentions "systems programming" and "high-performance computing". Do you have any resources for that (whether it be books, videos, courses)?

High frequency trading. If you’re talking something more hardware focused, try job searching for the exact term “C/C++”. These jobs are typically standard library deprived (read: malloc, new, etc) and you’ll be making calls to register sets, SPI and I2C lines. Embedded systems, really; think robotics, aviation, etc. If that’s still too little hardware try finding something in silicon validation. Intel (of yesterday), AMD, nvidia, Broadcom, you’ll be doing C to validate FPGA and ASIC spin ups. It’s the perfect way to divorce yourself from conventional x86 desktops and learn SOC programming, which close loops itself back into fields like HFT where FPGA experience is _incredibly_ lucrative.

But when anyone says systems programming, thinks hardware: how do I get that additional 15% performance on top of my conventional understanding of big O notation? Cache lines, cache levels, DMAs, branch prediction, the lot.

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