I have yet to hear a single convincing argument by a person that works in software why they can't be replaced.
to be fair, I'm not really seeing many people insisting otherwise, not anymore at least.
AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#52Compiler developers couldn't beat compilers at generating code either.
It's fun to think about why that is. Most compilers explore the code into sea of nodes, with explicit relation kinds (depends-on, computes, effect relations etc) that humans don't have access to in surface languages. Then they just reduce and shorten a lot of the unnecessary edge chains, sometimes duplicate code that improves scheduling and a lot of not-so-semantically relevant stuff to get a dataflow that is guaranteed to have the same external behaviour with the code they're compiling. So basically compilers work on representations that humans almost never see, with different objectives that humans have. If humans were to code directly in dataflow networks and could find a way to keep them tidy and neat, I think humans would have a chance to beat solutions generated from surface code and then compiled automatically.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your job safety doesn’t depend on the capabilities of AI but on what management thinks are the capabilities of AI
I don't think this makes any sense. Companies with managers that think AI capabilities are superior will be replaced if they are wrong as the companies will perform very poorly.
And such management faults never ever happened before.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#54Good news - Anthropic will pay you £600k to build the AI which replaces you.
Drag it out for a couple of years and you'll be set.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this makes any sense. Companies with managers that think AI capabilities are superior will be replaced if they are wrong as the companies will perform very poorly.
Hello, efficient market fallacy. Markets are not actually efficient, and especially not instantaneously so. There are a million ways to observe various market inefficiencies[1], so it's childishly naive to assert that they are in fact perfectly efficient according to some ideological belief of yours without considering reality. [1] Some examples: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
What I say has nothing to do with efficient market hypothesis. Here the question is simpler: in small companies where there are competitors, who does the wrong choices will be seriously hit since customers will star preferring less slop and more reliability, if AI is mis-used. And companies that instead of firing, hire the folks that are "ideas people" and can use AI efficiently, and now how to control the quality of the output, will deliver more and better. For bigger companies: AI is driving salaries at a more normal level (honestly we want a bit too high, in recent years, even for people with a very low level of knowledge, didn't we?) and to marginally reduce total spending and not deliver the timeline they have, and are used to observe for years, will be noticed. Also companies in the past had a dangerous tendency to over-hire. I don't think now they will invert the direction and over-fire. I have the feeling many managers will instead reason in terms: what is today the great programmer fit? The one with low level knowledge of each algorithm, or the one that has good ideas and understands product, quality, processes, other than programming? And they will try to mix AI and people in order to have an edge.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument is "Software Engineer" sounds like "Programmer" to me and "Programming" is just typing lines of code, AI can do all that typing quicker than a human so there we go. Currently leading an Integration that for the most part needs no new code written and the CEO is breathing down my neck telling me to cut my 4 week estimate down to 1 because "can't i just use AI like the other firms do?". There's a morbid pa…
Doctor sounds like Nurse, which sounds like applying bandages and taking temperatures. Physicist sounds like Lab Technician, which sounds like managing samples. Electrical Engineer sounds like Electrician, which sounds like installing a bunch of wire. Stunt Driver sounds like Uber Driver which sounds like pushing pedals and turning a wheel. It’s fun to pretend the world is much simpler than it is.
Much less emasculating than accepting that all that weird tech mumbo jumbo that those overpaid senior engineers babble about actually has a deeper meaning and is not just there to artificially slow down the all important company growth!
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#57The article is quite general. Here's some notes on how AI is being used to do AI research at frontier labs specifically. It's not the singularity (yet?) but it's heading in that direction. Most training is now actually inference, not directly gradient descent. Reinforcement learning requires the generation of lots of 'rollouts' that are then compared with each other via an algorithm like GRPO. Or they might be compar…
It's the Einstein question. Given an LLM trained on all written word up until right before Einstein's work, could the current SOTA in LLM architecture rediscover relativity? The jury is out on that, but until someone runs that experiment and proves otherwise, we have to assume LLMs simply aren't capable of that kind of brilliance. They're still impressive and useful and also stupid at times, but at the end of the day, no LLM has a gut to make a gut decision with. Unlike us.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello, efficient market fallacy. Markets are not actually efficient, and especially not instantaneously so. There are a million ways to observe various market inefficiencies[1], so it's childishly naive to assert that they are in fact perfectly efficient according to some ideological belief of yours without considering reality. [1] Some examples: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
What I say has nothing to do with efficient market hypothesis. Here the question is simpler: in small companies where there are competitors, who does the wrong choices will be seriously hit since customers will star preferring less slop and more reliability, if AI is mis-used. And companies that instead of firing, hire the folks that are "ideas people" and can use AI efficiently, and now how to control the quality of…
I think we're in partial agreement on some things. I agree that the software field overhired and overpaid people who should never have had jobs in software in the first place, and that a correction is/was overdue. I also generally agree that small companies cannot afford to produce garbage software, and if they make poor decisions about hiring or AI usage, they will die in the womb. But startups failing is not really what I think of when somebody says "companies will be replaced" or "your job security is contigent on what management thinks of AI capabilities". Those sentences both convoke images of already-successful enterprise companies, and already-successful enterprise companies are the ones that are most resistant to market forces. Indeed, we already see this in the real world, because most enterprise companies produce truly horrifyingly bad software, even before AI. The secret is that you need to produce good software to become successful, and then once successful, network effects take over and your company can become unbelievably inefficient and have little to no fear of being replaced. Tech is a ridiculously winner-take-all field, and it's very common for a single company to capture over 50% of their market, after which point they are effectively irreplaceable no matter how many bad decisions they make, at least for many years if not decades.
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#59Loosely related: Long read in today's FT on "The race to build AI that can improve itself" ( https://www.ft.com/content/7cc7800f-18ed-47d8-9539-221ae3e16... ). Although this may be more relevant to replacing AI researchers, not AI engineers... (Submitted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380643 )
... and so the skynet saga begins
Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI
#60I have yet to hear a single convincing argument by a person that works in software why they can't be replaced.
Well the fact that 0 developers are replaced by AI should tell you something
Someone is not let go with the announcement "you are replaced with AI". I know many teams that have downsized, or are not hiring after someone left. There is a reason why leverage of employees has drastically gone down. I myself am struggling in this aspect.