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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#451

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

thechao wrote: post #331
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

I agree with this stance. Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it.

I know that is confronting for a lot of people, but I think it is better to accept it, and spend time thinking about what your experience is worth. (A lot!)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#452

Post by skydhash »

ryandrake wrote: post #289
Madmallard wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think (1) will be true? It is only generating based on training data. In mature code bases there is a massive amount of interconnected state that is not already present in any github repository. The new logic you'd want to add is likely something never done before. As other programmers have stated, it seems to be improving at generating useful boilerplate and making simple websites and such related to…

> The new logic you'd want to add is likely something never done before. 99% of software development jobs are not as groundbreaking as this. It’s mostly companies doing exactly what their competitors are doing. Very few places are actually doing things that an LLM model has truly never seen crawling through GutHub. Even new innovative products generally boil down to the same database fetches and CRUD glue and JSON pa…

> Even new innovative products generally boil down to the same database fetches and CRUD glue and JSON parsing and front end form filling code.

The simplest version of that is some CGI code a PHP script. Which everyone should be writing according to your description. But why so many books have been written to be able to do this seemingly simple task? So many frameworks, so many patterns, so many methodologies....

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#453

Post by jdmoreira »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #447
jdmoreira wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

don't you follow the news? Amazon is bidding on nuclear power plants. We will just build more energy sources. We have way too much leeway to go. Also optimizations are being built both in hardware and software. There is no foreseen barrier. Maybe data to do training but now the models have pivoted to test / inference compute and reinforcement learning and that seems to have no barrier except more compute and energy. That's what stargate is, UAE princes building datacenters in France is, etc… it's all in the news. So far, it seems like a straight line to AGI

Maybe a barrier will appear but doesn't seem like it atm

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#454

Post by bee_rider »

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…

The real hardcore experts should be writing libraries anyway, to fully take advantage of their expertise in a tiny niche and to amortize the cost of studying their subproblem across many projects. It has never been easier to get people to call your C library, right? As long as somebody can write the Python interface…

Numpy has delivered so many FLOPs for BLAS libraries to work on.

Does anyone really care if you call their optimized library from C or Python? It seems like a sophomoric concern.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#455

Post by varsketiz »

jdmoreira wrote: post #448
varsketiz wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying humans are peak intelligence.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#456

Post by lordswork »

layer8 wrote: post #365
RivieraKid wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here. AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this y…

When I see stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994610 (continued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996895 ), I think the field still has fundamental hurdles to overcome.

This kind of error doesn't really matter in programming where the output can be verified with a feedback loop.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#457

Post by pishpash »

abeppu wrote: post #412
lolinder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 G…

I think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.

That already happens. Maps directs you to odd nonsense detours somewhat frequently now, that you get better results by overriding the machine. It's going down the way of web search.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#458

Post by 999900000999 »

renewiltord wrote: post #387
999900000999 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not like it's going to happen for me, but how did you reach such comp.

I'm a simple man. If I hit 2 million in net worth I'm done working. I don't plan on having a family, so I'm just supporting myself.

If I really made a ton of money I'd fund interesting open source games. Godot is the most popular open source game engine, and they're making it happen off just 40k a month.

I'm a bit surprised Microsoft hasn't filled the void here. What's a few million dollars a year to get new programmers fully invested in a .net first game engine?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#459

Post by kmoser »

gorjusborg wrote: post #362
thechao wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits product…

We will see both: lots of poor code, lots of neutral code (LLMs cranking out reasonably well written boilerplate), and even some improved code (by devs who use LLMs to ferret out inefficiencies and bugs in their existing, human-written codebase).

This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#460

Post by ivanbalepin »

gorjusborg wrote: post #362
thechao wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits product…

> Code is a liability

This is so true! Actual writing of the code is such a small step in overall running of a typical business/project, and the less of it the better.

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